Four key considerations for successfully setting up a nature strategy
What should organisations consider when developing a nature strategy? What does successful implementation of a nature strategy look like? There is global momentum behind the link between nature and business, galvanised by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and COP16.
Business leaders understand that achieving success and growth without prioritising, protecting and restoring nature will be challenging. By effectively managing natural resources, business can mitigate risks and deliver positive outcomes for nature, alongside improved financial performance.
However, with a regulatory landscape that can feel complex and approaches to nature that will differ across regions, what should your approach be?
Here are four key things you need to know.
1. Identify key interfaces with nature
Your adoption pathway for a strategy on nature is likely to differ from those around you. The important thing is to take the first step and make a start on understanding the inherent connection between your business and nature. Generating a working hypothesis about where your major interfaces are likely to be is key to defining the parameters of more detailed follow up work.
The relationship between business and nature is most often interdependent. For example, if your business is centred on agriculture, pollinator species that enable productive crop yields will be a material dependency. Water resource use to facilitate irrigation is likely to be a key impact. Identifying the likely material interfaces (such as land-use change, resource use, water consumption, pollution levels) is the first step to understanding your dependencies and impacts on nature.
The assessment can be limited to a particular part of the business or its direct operations, expanding to other aspects and wider value or supply chain over time. Identifying likely material dependencies and impacts now will help shape the scope of the assessment and allow you to start thinking about how to address these issues. It will de-risk the process of needing to do this in future under short timescales.
The process is intended to be iterative. As such, the initial work can be high-level and used to guide more detailed work as you progress. It is also important to define the parameters of the initial assessment up front, including the likely level of funding/resource needed, data requirements and intended level of ambition.
2. The ESG landscape can feel overwhelming, so get a grip on the basics now
TNFD, CSRD, ISSB/IFRS1 and 2鈥� the ESG landscape can feel overwhelming and confusing. If you aren鈥檛 an ESG expert, it is understandable that you may get lost in a sea of letters and numbers.
But staying tapped into what is happening in the ESG space is important if you are to effectively set up and implement a nature strategy that links to disclosure requirements. There are mandated disclosure regimes, as well as voluntary frameworks. Some focus specifically on nature, others on wider sustainability.
Staying tapped into what is happening in the ESG space is important if you are to effectively set up and implement a nature strategy that links to disclosure requirements.
The approach should be selected based on regulatory compliance in your region, what works best with other organisational sustainability goals and by reviewing what others are doing in your sector.
To start with, brushing up on the is sensible. The TNFD is the nature equivalent to , so you may have learnings from the TCFD to lean on 鈥� particularly with regards to supply chain evaluation. It gives organisations and financial institutions a risk management and disclosure framework to assess, report and act on nature related dependencies.
3. Make a business case
Getting the leaders of your business on board is critical in achieving success. When those in your C:suite understand the importance of nature in protecting the longevity and success of their business, it means that action is more likely to happen.
When executives buy in to supporting a nature strategy, there will inevitably be increased impetus, wider strategic alignment, resource allocation and access to funding to make it happen.
Nature strategy is often aligned with broader climate strategy; making it clear to your C:suite that nature and climate are inherently interlinked, and efforts should not be discrete but holistic, will enable them to understand the bigger picture and support implementation efforts. Actions related to supporting the environment often stack together 鈥� consider how social impact, climate resilient design and decarbonisation are relevant in these conversations to maximise value.
4. Set targets
To be able to set meaningful targets, it is important to first understand your baseline position and consider how nature and biodiversity can be measured in a robust but cost-effective way. Understanding existing data and potential gaps can be used in future target setting and KPIs.
The work you will have already done in understanding material interfaces with nature will come into play here. Understanding data gaps, data requirements for stakeholders, links with disclosure metrics and a suggested approach to monitoring are all key.
When goals are specific and measurable, they provide clarity to your whole organisation, and also create accountability and set up future evaluation of performance. But there is no need to do all this immediately. Indeed, action can be taken before a full understanding of the data is achieved 鈥� setting targets for some more straightforward aspects can occur first. More complex issues can come further down the line once more comprehensive data is available.
2023 saw the launch of the , which is connected to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Using of Assess, Prioritize, Set targets, Act and Track, provides a framework for target setting.
海角视频鈥檚 expertise and experience
Joined-up thinking when approaching the management of nature, can help solve other challenges, especially those related to the climate crisis. Action taken to benefit one topic area can impact others e.g. green space that protects nature and increases biodiversity will also provide people access to nature, flood risk mitigation and carbon sequestration.
Effective strategies lead to positive action, but a shift in culture to thinking holistically and moving away from short-term thinking is needed to achieve this. There are opportunities to be grasped: for example, 鈥榥ature-based solutions鈥� are interventions that use the protection, sustainable management or restoration of ecosystems to provide solutions to a problem. Such solutions differ depending on context but will often result in multiple positive outcomes (with particular relevance for the areas of social impact, climate resilience and sequestering carbon).
For example, 海角视频 was engaged by Kent County Council in the UK, who declared a climate and ecological emergency in 2019. Our nature and biodiversity specialists conducted a review of existing evidence relating to nature-based solutions in the UK and internationally. The team also undertook a detailed mapping exercise to assess the type, extent and distribution of existing habitats within Kent, and to identify those that could support nature-based solutions.
The final report presented the opportunities for nature-based solutions in Kent and included a high-level recommendation of those solutions that could be implemented within different timescales and detail on the potential funding streams for delivering the solutions.
海角视频 has a long track record of joined-up thinking in delivering opportunities, and in working in a trans-and-multi-disciplinary manner. Since improving nature outcomes should be considered strategically (and not in isolation), our ability to work in a holistic way, across multiple disciplines, can maximise value for our clients.
Learn more about our approach to nature here.