Founded in 1903, Fauna & Flora International (FFI) is a registered charity and the world’s longest established international conservation body. FFI is a biodiversity specialist with extensive experience on incorporating the economic values of nature into business decision making and a strong interest in ensuring natural capital assessments adequately incorporate biodiversity risk and opportunity management.

FFI has worked closely with businesses, and influencers of business, since 1997, partnering with a variety of global corporations to integrate biodiversity into management decisions, especially in the extractives and agricultural sectors and focusing on implementation at the business unit level, producing tools such as the Biodiversity Risk and Opportunity Tool or the High Level and Site Level Biodiversity Risk Assessment tools. In addition, FFI has worked closely with finance sector to integrate natural capital into financial decision making processes, producing the Ecosystems Benchmark Tool, two natural capital accounting reports with ACCA and KPMG, supporting the Natural Capital Declaration and running the Sustainable Fishing Initiative.

FFI is part of the Natural Capital Coalition and is strong supporter of the Natural Capital Protocol, playing an active role in its development. It is also a leading member of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) which acts as the Coalition’s primary partner for biodiversity issues. FFI would be keen to work with organisations looking to explore and implement the Protocol, particularly those concerned with significant impacts or dependencies on biodiversity, and would be in a position to offer both technical advice as well as staff training programmes.

UNEP-WCMC is UNEP’s specialist biodiversity arm, and the global biodiversity authority. Our mission echoes that of the Coalition: to provide authoritative information about biodiversity and ecosystem services. Working with partners worldwide, the Centre provides objective, scientifically rigorous products and services to help decision-makers learn the value of biodiversity and apply this knowledge.

The Centre has unrivalled expertise in sharing and promoting best practice, including through Proteus, the Centre’s longstanding partnership with some of the largest extractive companies, the National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plan (NBSAP) Forum, or the Sub-Global Assessment Network.

The UNEP-WCMC Business and Biodiversity team excel in demonstrating the business case for integrating biodiversity and ecosystem services into decision making through the provision of data, contextual information, and technical support. UNEP-WCMC’s partnerships deliver high quality data to corporate decision-makers through a long standing partnership with the extractive sector – Proteus – which feeds biodiversity data into risk assessment, impact assessment and reporting.

The Centre has a reputation as a centre of excellence in data provision. This is where UNEP-WCMC can offer the largest contribution to the Coalition’s mission. The recently published “Towards a global map of natural capital: key ecosystem assets” aptly demonstrates how the Centre can amplify the Coalition’s call for access to reliable data.

UNEP-WCMC’s vision is “A world where decision makers in all sectors and at all levels recognize and take full account of the values of biodiversity as the bedrock of a global green economy and human well-being”; we look forward to contributing to the Coalition.

United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre

The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) managed the Protocol Pilot Programme which included over 50 companies pilot testing the Natural Capital Protocol to ensure it is robust, practical and relevant for business. Working closely with the companies, CISL was able to collect feedback that informed the development of the Protocol. CISL is now leading the Pilot Application Programme which will focus upon the Protocol application and build an effective, cooperative group of businesses who are using it.

CISL empowers business and policy leaders to tackle critical global challenges. By bringing together multidisciplinary researchers with influential business and policy practitioners across the globe, it fosters an exchange of ideas across traditional boundaries to generate new, solutions-oriented thinking.

Across complex and connected issues, CISL challenges, informs and supports leaders from business and policy to deliver change towards sustainability. Rewiring the Economy is CISL’s ten-year plan to lay the foundations for a sustainable economy. The plan is built on ten interdependent tasks, delivered by government, finance and business co-operatively over the next decade to create an economy that encourages sustainable business practices and delivers positive outcomes for people and societies.

One of CISL’s Platforms, the Natural Capital Leaders Platform has been working with over 100 companies wishing to understand and manage their impacts and dependencies on natural resources and ecosystems. The Platform aims to help progressive companies develop practical approaches for businesses to value, measure and manage their opportunities from, and impacts on, natural capital.

The Natural Capital Protocol is a guide for businesses looking to better understand and manage their relationships with the environment using a natural capital framework. Increasingly accepted as the standard framework for companies looking to understand natural capital, the Protocol recognises the importance of biodiversity as an underlying component of natural capital, but also recognises the challenges in capturing the specific values of biodiversity. These challenges were underlined by the public consultation to the Protocol where concerns were raised that biodiversity and its relationship to natural capital was insufficiently covered, that not enough attention was given to non-financial values and that, ultimately, companies would struggle to manage or even recognise impacts and dependencies on biodiversity as a result. The pilot studies to the Protocol supported this. Although most stated the guidance was sufficient with respect to biodiversity, in practice the focus was on the more tangible relationships with water and carbon and none included impacts or dependencies on biodiversity as part of their assessment.

The Natural Capital Coalition recognises the need to strengthen the way the Protocol deals with biodiversity. It has therefore partnered with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI), a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and leading biodiversity-focused conservation organisations, to address this challenge. Working with the European Business and Biodiversity Platform and other partners, CCI will build a cohort of experts who can act as change agents to define, develop and ultimately deliver more robust, biodiversity-inclusive natural capital assessments.
The goal of the joint project is to improve the incorporation of biodiversity into natural capital assessments. To achieve this, five objectives have been identified:
1. To determine the extent of corporate activity on biodiversity within natural capital assessments, perceived limitations of current approaches and secure broad support for an initiative to address those limitations by identifying and engaging with key stakeholders.
2. To identify appropriate responses to better integrating biodiversity into corporate natural capital assessments, barriers to those responses and means of overcoming them by using stakeholder needs and concerns identified in objective 1.
3. To ensure better representation of biodiversity within the natural capital assessments by developing a set of guidance documents or approaches in response to the findings of objective 2. A supplement to the Protocol will be one option, but the final decision will depend upon the requirements of the end users.
4. To build the business case for, and ability of, key stakeholder groups to better integrate the value of nature into corporate natural capital assessments by testing the developed product(s) from objective 3.
5. To increase and improve the integration of biodiversity into corporate natural capital assessments by disseminating the product(s) developed and lessons learned in objective 4 to key stakeholders.

The EU Business and Biodiversity (B@B) platform is an initiative by the European Commission to facilitate a greater engagement of private businesses to address the impact and dependencies of business on nature by accounting for the ecosystem services a business depends upon to operate and for the cost of direct and indirect impacts on the environment.

The platform shall work with business to further develop approaches such as guidelines, methodologies or tools (e.g. indicators or ecosystem-based approaches) that will promote the integration of biodiversity considerations into Business practice. In particular identifying, quantifying and/or valuing dependencies and impacts to inform business decision-making and reporting. The platform work shall support businesses in making better informed decisions — i.e. in terms of reducing business and ecological risks, higher efficiency using natural resources or ecosystem services.

Building on existing initiatives, the dedicated work stream Natural Capital Accounting of the platform has been considering methodologies establishing good practice principles in natural capital accounting in the private sector, with a particular focus on biodiversity and ecosystems. Key deliverables developed by the EL) Business and Biodiversity Platform so far include a business guide on how to select among 11 of the leading approaches on corporate Natural Capital Accounting (NCA). This is complemented by an overview comparing Natural Capital Accounting approaches.

Taking this work forward will require to develop closer synergies with the wider EL) and international work on natural capital accounting such as the Natural Capital Coalition.