Protecting nature requires more than 'feel-good' projects from businesses
15 October 2024 - Are businesses merely paying lip service while nature collapses around us? CISL’s interim CEO Lindsay Hooper weighs in and provides her learnings on developing strong biodiversity strategies for systemic change. First published in edie.
Two years ago in Montreal, the world witnessed a landmark achievement: finally, an ambitious global agreement to protect and restore nature. Yet, as we approach the next global nature summit in Cali, following the grim news from WWF this week, the reality is setting in.
For all the talk about becoming ‘nature positive’, action remains fragmented and woefully inadequate. Not only have we failed to make serious progress in restoring critical environmental systems, we have failed to even halt their destruction. It’s time to ask a blunt question: Are we merely paying lip service while nature collapses around us?
Over the last decade, climate change has dominated the sustainability agenda. But despite years of pledges, investments, and innovations, we have yet to make a dent in reducing greenhouse gas emissions – with multiple fragile environments and species facing destruction as a result of climatic changes.
And while mainstream focus has been almost exclusively on climate, nature has been left to deteriorate at an alarming rate. Industrialised agriculture, habitat destruction, and pollution of our air, rivers, and oceans have continued unabated, pushing nature beyond the brink.
The global agreement in Montreal was celebrated as a turning point. It was also the first time that the private sector showed up in force to a nature summit. Over the past two years, there has been growing business momentum on nature. But, for all the talk and optimism, economy-wide solutions remain virtually non-existent, and business responses remain been focused on small, nature-positive projects with insufficient focus on the market infrastructure and incentives needed to drive action at scale.
Beyond standalone projects
Sea grass preservation, rewilding and other ‘hero’ projects – typically reliant on corporate social responsibility (CSR), philanthropy, and niche impact investments – are often highlighted as the answer to the nature crisis. These initiatives are beneficial in their own right, but they are hardly a comprehensive solution and are far from the systemic response we need.
The crux of the problem is that it remains more profitable in the short term to destroy nature than to protect it. Trillions of dollars of economic activity that degrade nature are propped up by entrenched subsidies and financial incentives. And not only is the private sector responsible for a wave of environmental destruction, but some of the ‘green solutions’ being proposed like biomass-based fuels, and plantations funded through carbon offsetting, also threaten to exacerbate pressure on finite land and undermine local community ownership. This is not systemic change; it’s business as usual.
Systems change
The assumption that economic growth can continue indefinitely while ecosystems crumble is as irrational as it is dangerous. As Partha Dasgupta laid out in his landmark report, and as Tony Juniper, Chair of Natural England highlighted this week, our economies and markets are underpinned by natural systems. Without these, economic competitiveness, security, and prosperity are impossible.
Yet, we still prioritise GDP growth at any cost – ignoring the growing range of plausible alternatives developed by leading economists – eroding our ‘natural wealth’, the very environmental infrastructure upon which we depend. This is nothing short of building a house of cards on a collapsing foundation.
The good news is that much of the groundwork needed to value and integrate nature into our economies has already been laid. There are robust frameworks, metrics, and standards for accounting for nature, as well as real-world examples of nature-positive projects delivering clear benefits - job creation, improved health outcomes, increased resilience and superior financial returns. But until these efforts are backed by hard financial and policy shifts that make it more profitable to protect nature than to degrade it, these efforts will be in vain.
A key risk in the immediate short term is that businesses will rush headlong into the same approach to nature as they have taken to climate – namely relying on voluntary targets and disclosures. First, this strategy has not been particularly successful in solving the climate crisis and risks us getting mired in technical details of reporting rather than targeted inventions to address systemic issues.
Second, the nature challenge is far more complex and place-specific. Unlike the energy transition, there are few simple technology swaps that will save complex environments. What’s needed is a rethinking of entire systems—starting with our food system.
This means moving beyond regenerative agriculture to include broader questions of what we eat, the most sustainable ways to meet our nutrition needs, the best use and stewardship of land, how we design out today’s profligate waste, how we protect community rights, and how we ensure decent work right across the food supply chain.
Strategic leverage points
Addressing these issues will require a different level of dialogue between the public and private sectors—conversations that go beyond platitudes to tackle the redesign of markets, subsidies, and economic incentives. The UK has made some progress with recent reforms in agricultural policy, but much more is needed – internationally – to develop mandates that drive change, catalyse innovative business models, and empower local decision-making. The strategic use of catalytic capital and philanthropy can help kickstart this shift, but policy leadership is essential to set the rules of the game, remove regulatory barriers, and embed nature into industrial, economic, and regional development strategies.
At the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, we’re working in partnership with other organisations to tackle these systemic problems, looking at how to identify, support and scale up nature-positive-aligned business models and nature finance.
None of this will happen without business action and leadership. It is in business’s own interests to get serious about the scale of the challenge, to reinvent business models and wider industry systems to align with a future economy in which activity that trashes the planet is banned or punished, and to be proactive, clear and specific about the regulatory interventions that are most needed to drive real-world outcomes and provide a commercially viable pathway to transition.
We have capital, growing appetite for change, and a huge body of solutions. What we lack is visible and informed leadership within corridors of power to do what is blatantly and urgently necessary: to put in place the structures and frameworks to enable us to thrive, compete and co-exist on a finite planet.
The stakes couldn’t be clearer: either we reshape our markets for nature, or brace for nature to reshape them for us.