Integrating resilience into corporate nature agendas to enhance business and investor action

Research team

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Will Bugg – University of Exeter

Tim Lenton – University of Exeter

Oshadee Siyaguna – J O Hambro (Regnan)

Steve Smith – University of Exeter

Jesse Abrams – University of Exeter

Joshua Buxton – University of Exeter

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Partnership

“J O Hambro, through our resilient systems brand Regnan, is excited to be partnering with RENEW on finding solutions to the renewal of biodiversity.  Human existence is intimately interwoven with the natural world, which it has been reshaping for millennia. Healthy and resilient biodiversity is essential to underpin the wellbeing of our economic system and the social constructs that is supports.” 

– Andrew Parry, Head of Investments at J O Hambro Capital Management

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Aims

This project examined how businesses affect biodiversity and ecosystem resilience through land-use change, and how resilience thinking can be built into corporate strategy and nature-impact analysis. The work combined interviews with sustainability professionals across sectors with a global, satellite-based analysis of vegetation resilience. This research aims to address this by answering the following questions:

• How do managers make sense of biodiversity challenges, and what is required to move beyond symbolic engagement toward transformative action?
• How should firms operationalise their dependence on socio-ecological systems in concrete strategic choices, governance arrangements and day-to-day priorities?
• How do climate controls on vegetation resilience vary by biome?
• What can we currently do, and what more is needed, to improve our quantitative understanding of business impact on biodiversity and natural ecosystem resilience?

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Key Concepts

Resilience: the speed at which a system returns to its original state following a perturbation.

Tipping point: when a small change makes a big difference to a system because it triggers processes within the system that amplify change – potentially irreversibly – tipping the system into an alternate state.

Systems thinking: an approach to problem-solving that looks at systems as a whole, and the complex interactions and connections within that system, rather than reducing it to its component parts.

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Approach –

Qualitative strand (business interviews, ~20 sustainability professionals)

• Produced an action agenda for embedding biodiversity into corporate strategy, built around five themes: collaboration (especially internal cross-functional collaboration, not just external partnerships), education, better/less fragmented biodiversity tools, flexible regulation, and “authentic incremental action” rather than waiting for a perfect solution.
• Developed a Socio-Ecological Resilience Strategy Canvas – an adapted business-model-canvas tool translating resilience principles into strategic prompts (governance, collaboration, resources, value proposition, metrics).

Quantitative strand (global satellite data)

• Using a global, satellite-based analysis of vegetation resilience across 14 biomes (2003–2022), this strand of the research examines how climate variables shape ecosystem resilience differently around the world and explores how well current biodiversity datasets can support this kind of analysis for business use.
• Building on the climate-resilience analysis, we also explore whether global biodiversity data, including species richness for both animals and plants, adds anything to our understanding of ecosystem resilience, alongside climate variables. This is an exploratory piece of work, focused on testing whether current global biodiversity datasets are detailed and reliable enough to be useful for this kind of analysis, and identifying what better data would need to look like in future.

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Impact

This research has translated resilience thinking into two practical tools for business: an action agenda for overcoming the barriers sustainability teams face in practice, and a Strategy Canvas that helps firms embed nature dependencies into governance and decision-making rather than treating biodiversity as a standalone environmental project. The accompanying global resilience analysis gives a biome-specific evidence base for where climate change poses the greatest risk to ecosystem stability, directly relevant to companies assessing physical nature-related risk in their operations and supply chains, with future scope to develop quantitative tools using similar methods.