Building biodiversity into business delivery

Delivering against the broad sustainability requirements (people, planet and profit) is a complex set of elements to balance. Biodiversity has been one of the elements that has, for many, been overlooked. This is both due to the lack of maturity around the development of the associated regulatory frameworks and the capacity (and capabilities) that organisations have to manage delivery in this area. Some of the areas that need to be considered (and the associated challenges) when building out the biodiversity approach include:

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• Understanding impacts: While measurement standards and organisations to support that measurement are developing, determining how biodiversity impacts the business (from risk management to marketing) is complex and poorly understood

• Regulatory/investment drive: Biodiversity regulation is becoming a major factor for businesses – BNG on capital build, TNFD implementation, IFC PS6/HCV investment criteria, incorporation into SBTi, CSRD, etc. Organisations need to understand how to manage these emerging changes

• Setting biodiversity strategies: There are multiple facets to biodiversity delivery: Capital build through to large scale Nature Based Solutions (NBS), managing elements of biodiversity (deforestation, waste management, etc. ), managing risks/how key elements of biodiversity impact the business, building biodiversity into operations, etc. Creating strategies across these issues is still very much in the early stages

• Developing mitigations: Need to develop approaches around capital asset design, incorporating biodiversity into product design and managing biodiversity in the supply chain – and determine who the business can work with to deliver biodiversity solutions/associated business plans

• Convening partnerships: Biodiversity will require partnerships from delivery through to creating broad NBS solutions across scale eco-systems.

• Driving biodiversity investment: While there is significant funding in the markets for sustainability, creating the robust business cases to be able to attract that investment (both for owned assets and partners) will be a key part of getting many biodiversity solutions off the ground (aligning value of delivery to investor’s required outcomes)

•Managing Offset solutions: The last resort for companies, offsets, are playing a significant role in the short term as in house mitigation activities develop. Ensuring that the offsets meet regulatory (e.g. BNG) and corporate requirements (e.g. Planet Positive Credits) when markets are still forming (and avoiding many of the issues seen in the voluntary carbon markets) will be an essential part of delivery

 

Tools provided: Integrated biodiversity solution (baseline to delivery)

 

To address the issues/challenges outlined above the Chestnut tree partnership has developed an end to end set of solutions working with partners to deliver against the biodiversity issues that corporates are impacted by in their day to day delivery.

 

An outline of the the key elements at each stage of delivery is shown below:

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The solution that we apply is broken into three key elements. These are not 'stages' of a journey, but elements of delivery that need to be applied in order to drive effective biodiversity ourcomes.

 

An outline view of these elements is shown below:

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The focus is on creating a solution that both delivers against the broader societal needs around biodiversity but also is aligned to the corporate approach and strategy. In each case we are looking at how to minimise impact, design mitigation solutions where they are appropriate and then working with partners to deliver elements of biodiversity credits (from BNG through to Nature Positive solutions) as required.