Theme 4: Business & Finance Decision-makers

Our work within Theme 4 recognises that embedding biodiversity renewal in finance and business activities is lagging substantially behind the advances that have occurred in carbon accounting and climate change. We will develop new tools and standards to close this gap and test their application.

The business and finance sectors are paying increasing attention to the material economic risks from biodiversity loss to their core activities and the impacts of these activities on biodiversity. Global and national corporate actors are investigating how to make their activities ‘nature positive’ through a range of initiatives, but methods to quantify and visualise the biodiversity consequences of business and investment decisions is complex, much more so than for climate and carbon. This complexity can result in businesses being unable to enact nature-positive practices or using extreme simplifications of ‘nature’ that have limited or uncertain effectiveness. Theme 4 is working to address the barriers and enablers to nature-positive business actions and will help identify the best approaches and tools to embed rigorous scientific evidence into corresponding decision-making processes, co-creating with partners a biodiversity intelligence capability that accelerates integration of biodiversity renewal into business and investment decisions.

Objectives

Theme 4 is working to:

Identify and engage the leaders whose personalised ecology, community membership and position within major businesses make them powerful potential biodiversity champions. Include a focus on businesses whose workforces, supply chains, clients, or customers come from a diverse range of communities, including those that are often overlooked in relation to biodiversity renewal.
Assess awareness, use and impact of the tools available to businesses to evaluate ‘double materiality’ of biodiversity and identify opportunities of biodiversity gain.
Co-create with biodiversity champions and key stakeholders a ‘Biodiversity dashboard’ that can inform business and investment decisions, through showing how they directly impact biodiversity in the UK (e.g. through real estate, agriculture, forestry) and indirectly impact biodiversity more broadly (through whole supply chains).
Identify positive tipping points that business and finance decision-makers can trigger to accelerate biodiversity renewal and barriers to them.

Meet the team