Geneva, 9 December 2021 – Today, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) launched the practitioner’s guide: what does nature-positive mean for business? This guide is the result of a multistakeholder process, including about 60 organizations from different disciplines, sectors and value chains.
The guide supports credible business action to a nature-positive as well as a net-zero and equitable world, expanding on the building blocks infographic released earlier this year. Using common steps from existing frameworks as a basis, the building blocks help business understand the implications of the Global Goal for Nature in raising the level of ambition and action to achieve a nature-positive world by 2030.
In summary, the guide will:
- Show business how to credibly contribute to nature-positive outcomes, helping them to better identify and understand the implications of a Global Goal for Nature: net positive by 2030 and full recovery by 2050.
- Break down the concepts related to nature-positive that appear in key publications and translate them into clear language to help various functions from across business understand how nature-positive can be applied to existing business frameworks.
- Serve as the foundation for roadmaps that help business navigate actions, tools, and other resources across different value chains.
From June to August 2021, WBCSD convened 75 stakeholders representing 60 organizations from different disciplines, sectors, and value chains. The aim was not to define what “nature-positive” means per se, but to identify existing relevant frameworks and create a shared understanding of the key nature-positive messages or building blocks to support communication and awareness raising with non-expert business audiences.
The intent of this publication is for all stakeholders to use these building blocks to communicate the nature-positive actions they take and ensure that, collectively, all stakeholders in the business and nature-positive space put forward a clear and coherent collective response from business to contribute to an equitable, net-zero, nature-positive world.
These building blocks serve as foundational pieces for the sectoral roadmaps to nature-positive that will be developed by WBCSD, starting in 2022 for key priority sectors: land use (including agriculture and forestry), built environment and energy . This actionable roadmaps will guide the application of relevant tools and frameworks with examples across sectors and value chains.
The six building blocks:
Assess & prioritize - Assess realms of nature potentially relevant to operations and value chain and prioritize impacts, dependencies, and opportunities for regeneration.
Commit - Set a baseline and commit to ambitious, time-bound, science-informed goals and targets to both halt and reverse the loss of nature.
Measure & value - Use validated, inter-related indicators to measure nature outcomes that inform decision-making.
Act - Systematically apply the mitigation hierarchy within and beyond operations to reduce pressures and have positive contributions across value chains.
Transform - Collaborate to achieve nature-positive outcomes across all spheres of control and influence.
Disclose & report - Prepare to disclose material nature-related information.
