3 July 2019: A group of stakeholders launched the ‘Business for Nature’ coalition, which aims to provide a united business voice at the negotiations on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework to be adopted under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in 2020. According to the launching announcement, the coalition aims to “clearly demonstrate” that the protection of nature is “an economic as well as a moral imperative,” and to call on governments to adopt “an ambitious new deal for nature and people” in 2020 to protect and enhance the natural world, supported by specific sets of actions.

Specifically, the coalition aims to demonstrate the existing scale of business actions to protect nature by: uniting, amplifying, and helping to scale existing business commitment platforms; driving the global narrative around the economic importance of “a thriving natural world”; and showcasing business solutions that translate commitments into actions for meaningful impact.

On the occasion of the launch, Paul Polman, Chair, International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), expressed his excitement about the coalition’s potential to bring business leaders together to act and advocate for nature. Noting that our entire economy “is a subsidiary of nature,” he stressed the need for business to come together “now, as we did for the Paris Climate Summit, to ensure that we collectively protect that which makes our very existence possible.” Thomas Lingard, Unilever, said the ‘Business for Nature’ coalition creates an opportunity for businesses to work together to demonstrate how protecting nature is at the heart of building “truly sustainable economies and livelihoods.”

The coalition partners include: the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), We Mean Business, the World Economic Forum (WEF), WWF, ICC, the Natural Capital Coalition, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Entreprises pour l’Environnement, the World Resources Institute (WRI), the Confederation of Indian Industry, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Food and Land Use Coalition and the Tropical Forest Alliance.

Alongside listing a number of nature commitment platforms where businesses can make pledges, the coalition’s website also suggests ways through which business can “already start delivering for nature” by:

• Working through their own operations and value chains to identify, reduce, and avoid impacts, while also identifying dependencies, nature-based solutions, and other opportunities that create benefits for nature and people;
• Leading landscape-level collaboration in landscapes, river basins and seascapes to ensure ecosystem conservation and restoration, and the supply of ecosystem services delivered by nature to society and the economy;
• Implementing systemic change to organizations and business models by identifying impacts and dependencies on natural capital and taking nature into account when making decisions, disclosing and reporting; and
• Recommending and promoting policy changes to governments to establish the policy frameworks needed to drive economic changes as scale.

The coalition was launched during the ninth Trondheim Conference on Biodiversity, which took place from 2-5 July 2019 in Trondheim, Norway. [WWF Press Release] [Business for Nature Website]