The latest WWF living planet report ‘will break your heart’, but many companies have yet to understand how risky their relationship with ecosystem services is. By David Burrows.
This week the 16th meeting of the Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity kicked off in Colombia (a country containing 10% of all species on earth). CBD COP16 – as it’s widely known – marks the first big meet since 2022, when countries agreed on the Kunming-Montreal Global Framework (GBF), billed as the most far-reaching action plan to protect biodiversity.
It was the first good news on nature for some time. As The Guardian reported last week in a useful ‘COP16 at a glance‘ piece: “Since its inception, the UN biodiversity process has been stuck in a cycle of underachievement. Despite urgent scientific warnings about the state of nature, countries have never met a target they set for themselves.”
Indeed, as the fortnight of discussions started in South America the results of the latest biennial WWF Living Planet Report were still being digested. The 26 words posted on social media by Client Earth CEO Laura Clarke were the pithiest of wake-up calls to save the planet: “The latest WWFliving planet report is out, and it will break your heart,” Clarke wrote. “It shows that wildlife numbers have fallen by 73% in 50 years.”
The food chain – from farmers to citizens and everything in between – must shoulder a share of responsibility for the damage we have all wrought and help to put it right. “The Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) […] recognises the private sector has a role to play if we hope to preserve life on Earth,” says Jenni Black, nature transformation lead at the World Benchmarking Alliance, “but our research shows that the vast majority of large companies continue to take nature for granted”.
Indeed, WBA’s updated nature benchmark report, published in August, showed that some companies have started to assess their impacts and dependencies, but these often only cover a fraction of their operations or the results are kept hidden, said WBA (so a bit like disclosing and tackling your scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions and ignoring scope 3).
The benchmark is scored out of 100. Subway managed just 6.8 (one of 27 food retailers to score below 10). Aramark managed 12.1, Elior Group 12.4, Domino’s 13.6, Restaurant Brands International 16.4 and McDonald’s 18. Sodexo (25.4), Compass (24.2), Starbucks (22.9) and Yum! Brands (20.9) fared a little better. Sainsbury’s managed the top score among food retailers (a group which includes supermarkets and foodservice operators) with 33.8. Elsewhere in the food sector space, Nestlé (54.1) was second out of all the 816 companies assessed from a variety of sectors; Diageo scored 40.1 putting it in 18th spot, while PepsiCo (37.8) beat Coca-Cola (31.1). Few of these companies will be shouting their scores from the rooftops, mind.
Water, of course!
There was better news this week in the form of CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) data: in the year after the adoption of the GBF in 2022, nature-related disclosures to CDP grew steadily, with a 43% increase in companies disclosing biodiversity data, a 23% increase on water, and a 10% rise on forests. Still, fewer than 1 in 10 companies currently assess their dependency on biodiversity, and wider understanding of financial impacts of nature remains limited, said CDP.
The data also highlights a “slow response” in understanding and addressing financial risks related to nature. Just a small minority of banks and investors said that they finance nature-based solutions (17%) or sustainable agriculture activities (23%).
Which brings me to a final, biodiversity-related item. In an opinion piece for New Scientist last week, Pierre du Plessis proposes a simple solution to plug the $200bn (£154bn) funding gap needed to save nature: a 1% levy on global retail sales.
“The retail sector has a unique position in latter-day capitalism: it collects consumer spending on behalf of all actors in the value chain,” explains the former lead negotiator for the African Group at the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Food and Agriculture Organisation. “Charging ‘nature’s share’ at the retail level means everyone involved contributes a little bit, and no one has to carry a huge burden. Such a predictable financial flow to environmental prerogatives would completely change the ‘mood music’ of global environmental governance,” he continues, “and it would come while there is still time to save the most precious remainders of life’s vast profusion before we humans push it into oblivion”.
