The Strengthening Understanding and Strategies of Business to Assess and Integrate Nature (SUSTAIN) project provides businesses, financial institutions, and regulatory bodies with the knowledge and resources to better understand, assess, and monitor the dependencies and impacts on nature from activities across different sectors of the economy.
The SUSTAIN project works with businesses, financial institutions and regulatory bodies and helps them to understand how their impacts and dependencies on nature affect their operations and profits through capacity building and the provision of tools and technical skills needed to comprehensively integrate the value of nature into their decision-making.
All businesses depend on healthy, biodiverse, and functioning ecosystems, either through their direct operations or through their supply chains. Actors across society must work towards enabling transformative change to shift away from negative practices and move towards a system that is nature-positive.
The SUSTAIN project uses a multi-disciplinary approach to expand and further develop the existing knowledge base on business dependencies and impacts to drive better corporate and financial decision-making regarding biodiversity and ecosystem services and reduce resulting financial risks.
The project brings together a multi-disciplinary team of leading experts with backgrounds in ecology, conservation, economics, social sciences, and academic research. Together they aim to:
- Provide an enhanced knowledge base on impacts and dependencies of economic activities on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
- Develop methods to reduce biodiversity and ecosystem service-related risks and increase opportunities through innovative research and modelling techniques
- Develop a toolbox for businesses and financial institutions to use to understand, assess, measure and monitor impacts and dependencies on biodiversity
- Develop and disseminate business case materials
- Engage with key stakeholders from the business, finance, regulatory and intergovernmental spheres
This webpage will constantly be updated with reports and documents developed during the project as a result of collaborative efforts between all the partners involved and others. For example, the blueprints, which can be downloaded on the top right section, were developed as part of the wider project as a result of collaborative efforts between CPIC, South Pole, and the SUSTAIN partners. They aim to enable financial institutions seeking to positively impact biodiversity through conservation projects to understand existing investment frameworks better.
The project is co-funded by the EU, the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee. It runs for 3 years with the ambition to facilitate transformative changes within the global economy to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. The project partner consortium is made up of Capitals Coalition, Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, UNEP-WCMC, WBCSD, ShareAction, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, ETH Zürich, Fundación Biodiversidad and IUCN secretariat and European Regional Office.
