April News update: Shifting gears – time for implementation towards COP16

 
 
 

COP16 in Colombia is now only seven months away. Even with so much political uncertainty and heartbreaking wars, the momentum is still building.  

It’s our collective responsibility to ensure COP16 is a meaningful milestone that demonstrates that the implementation of ‘The Biodiversity Plan’ (the new name for the Global Biodiversity Framework) is well underway. Our work in accelerating business action and advocacy on nature ahead of COP16 is more crucial than ever. 

We are pressing ahead with delivering our priorities of business action and advocacy - from updating our policy recommendations to governments to calling on businesses to develop and publish credible nature strategies and taking meaningful sector-specific actions. And we’re excited to share we are also deepening this work through our regional leads in Latin America, Asia and Africa. 

However, it’s important to recognize we’re working in an increasingly challenging context. Recent climate news has ranged from dispiriting to shocking, and we see the environmental crisis having real political and social repercussions. This makes our work to unite around protecting, restoring and sustainably managing natural resources, our main ally in stabilizing the climate, all the more important.  

We are spurred on by the fantastic collaborations across the coalition and our growing number of partners (nearly 100!). We’re expanding the team (see two job openings below) and look forward to raising global ambitions for nature with your collaboration and support this year. 

Looking to COP16 and The Biodiversity Plan

 
 

As we get nearer to COP16 (21 Oct to 1 Nov 2024), and with Cali in Colombia confirmed as the host city, the Convention on Biological Diversity has launched an awareness campaign to support the implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework, now named ‘The Biodiversity Plan’. In addition to the new name, the campaign introduces more accessible language for each of the 23 targets. We are already incorporating the new language in our communications materials and would encourage you to do the same.

The theme is ‘Peace with Nature’ and details about the specific priorities are emerging – with the Colombian environment minister, Susana Muhamad, saying COP16 will place nature at the heart of the environmental agenda, with a focus on supporting megadiverse countries such as Colombia and Brazil, who will host the Climate COP30 in 2025.

Advocacy

Provide the courage, comfort and technical expertise to governments so that they adopt, implement and enforce ambitious policies

Policy recommendations consultation

The consultation period on our policy recommendations to governments ended on 1 March. We are delighted to have received 138 responses from organizations and businesses of all sectors and sizes – and thank all who took the time to participate in the consultation. We are now working through these contributions to develop a set of high-level policy recommendations that will help support our advocacy and business action work and the effective implementation of The Biodiversity Plan. In the next few weeks, we will share draft policy recommendations with a subgroup of partners for input and then approval to launch in May or early June.

Responsible Policy Engagement Guide

We have published a new Responsible Policy Engagement Guide to enable companies to respond to rising stakeholder expectations. The guide provides a clear roadmap for the steps companies should take to match their nature advocacy to their nature ambition and actively engage in advocating responsibly to policymakers.

Monthly policy updates

We have also started producing a monthly roundup of key nature policy news. Catch up on the main nature policy updates from February and March, that covers, amongst other things:

·       Nature policies face setback in European Council

·       China’s three largest stock markets announce mandatory nature-related reporting

·       Negotiations for deep-sea mining regulations advance

·       Brazil publishes strategic environmental plan.

 

Business Action

Scale and speed up business action by strengthening, clarifying and amplifying why and how companies should act now

 
 

It’s Now for Nature

Our joint, collective campaign It’s Now for Nature calls for companies to develop and publish credible nature strategies – providing a clear roadmap on steps to take and resources to draw on through the Nature Strategy Handbook. We are currently reviewing a number of strategies and refining our review process.

Please continue to promote the campaign by using the communications toolkit. 

Sector actions mini-campaigns

Following on from the launch of our sector-specific guidance with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), our ‘mini-campaigns’ to draw attention to individual sector reports are in full swing. The next sector to watch out for is construction materials (cement and concrete), coming out on 22 April. All the content can be accessed in this communications toolkit so feel free to use and share.

The sector guidance is an instrumental tool in galvanizing business action on nature and to engage businesses in the implementation of The Biodiversity Plan. To this end, we have produced an additional resource mapping the sector actions to the 23 targets as well as the Sustainable Development Goals.  

News from our partners

  • The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), in partnership with ANDI - National Association of Businessmen of Colombia, WWF and the Ministry of the Environment of Chile will be hosting a webinar, “Road to COP 16 on biodiversity in Latin America”, on 10 April. The event will be in Spanish.

  • FOLU, WBCSD and We Mean Business have launched two new reports highlighting the need for food and agriculture companies to rapidly adapt to changing sustainability regulation and exploring the costs and benefits of mitigating the largest portion of food sector emissions. Join their webinar on 11 April.

  • The World Economic Forum has launched the CEO Action Group for Nature, a peer-based community for business CEOs to understand the tools and knowledge needed to achieve nature-positive goals, exchange best practices and foster collective action across sectors.

  • TNFD has released two additional modules to complete the contents of its TNFD in a Box downloadable tool. The tool’s modules give an overview of why corporates and financial institutions need to consider nature as a strategic risk management issue and how they can identify, assess, manage and disclose their nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities by adopting the TNFD Recommendations. A board-level summary has also been added.

  • Business for Nature partners ICC and the World Economic Forum have become observers of the GEF’s Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), launched in June 2023 to scale up financing for the implementation of the GBF (now The Biodiversity Plan). The GBFF has just approved project preparation grants and set aside nearly $40 million to support new initiatives in Brazil, Gabon and Mexico.

  • The High-Level Climate Champions have launched a report summarizing the main achievements of COP28 in three critical areas: nature, inclusion, and multi-level action towards a resilient, net-zero future.

  • New global analysis of the trajectory of national environmental policies and their impacts on companies and investors has been published by the Inevitable Policy Response (IPR) forecast. This new research finds that the number of material and credible national policy announcements on nature, land use and food systems has doubled in the last 12 months.

Media highlights 

Business for Nature vacancies

Many thanks as always for your continued action, engagement and support.

Best regards,

Eva Zabey - on behalf of the BfN team
CEO, Business for Nature

 
 
 
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