Accelerating business solutions for climate and nature

The United Nations (UN) expected 2020 to be a “crunch year” for the biodiversity and climate emergencies – a make or break year in which key international meetings would set the tone and agenda for sustainability in the decade ahead, including the UN CBD (15th Conference of the Parties – COP15 – to the Convention on Biological Diversity) and the UNFCCC (26th COP to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – COP26). While COVID-19 dominated the policy agenda and led to the postponement of key UN conferences, its causes and impacts have emphasized the severity of risk societies face from the climate and nature crises and the urgent need to reverse nature loss and restore and conserve high value ecosystems. There is increasing evidence that human overexploitation of nature is a key factor causing the outbreak and spread of new diseases such as COVID-19. The effective functioning of the Earth’s systems is fundamentally reliant on nature. The Earth’s climate has co-evolved with nature over the history of the planet and they continue to shape each other through a complex pattern of interactions. Climate produces the conditions for nature to thrive, while nature regulates climate through the carbon and water cycles. Land-use change is one of the largest drivers of climate change and is also the single biggest environmental driver of new zoonotic disease outbreaks, such as COVID-19. The Future of Nature and Countries and businesses now have a unique opportunity to rebuild the world differently and “build forward better” by putting both nature and climate at the center of recovery. Healthy societies, resilient economies and thriving businesses rely on nature, but current data show that humans are outstripping nature’s ability to keep supplying its services on which everyone depends.

In fact, several reports over the years have highlighted nature’s value to society and business:

• Ecosystem services worldwide are worth an estimated USD $125 trillion annually and they support industries like farming, fishing, forestry and tourism;
• Industries that rely on nature employ around 1.2 billion people;
• More than half of the world’s GDP8 an estimated USD $44 trillion of economic value generation – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services.

Increasing awareness of nature related risks has led leaders in business, government and civil society to rank biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as one of the top five threats humanity will face in the next 10 years, along with climate change. While nature is under heavy pressure, it also holds the key to effective and scalable solutions for many societal challenges, including climate change and nature regeneration. Business, a recent report from the World Economic Forum, has identified USD $10 trillion in business opportunities and the potential creation of 395 million jobs by 2030 linked to addressing the drivers of nature loss. Investing in preserving and regenerating nature is essential to delivering co-benefits rather than trade-offs that place more pressure on natural systems. For several years now, business has been applying nature-based solutions (NbS) and in particular developing natural climate solutions (NCS) for climate mitigation and adaptation. As governments and business develop recovery plans, momentum is building to include these solutions as part of efforts to build forward better. NbS have a key role in sequestering carbon from hard-to-abate emissions and in mitigating climate change. But it is also necessary to scale them up to protect high-value ecosystems and reverse nature loss.

These solutions will be a focus area in UN conferences:
For climate in the UNFCCC COP26 in Glasgow, UK, for biodiversity at the CBD COP15 in Kunming in China, to ensure land degradation neutrality at the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) COP15 in Bonn, Germany, and to help transform food systems (which significantly contribute to both drivers of, and risks from, climate change and nature loss) at the UN Food Systems Summit in New York, USA.

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