The Strengthening Understanding and Strategies of Business to Assess and Integrate Nature (SUSTAIN) project provided 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.
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 worked with businesses, financial institutions and regulatory bodies to help them 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.
It used 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 brought together a team of leading experts with backgrounds in ecology, conservation, economics, social sciences, and academic research. Together they sought 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
All reports and documents published by SUSTAIN, as a result of collaborative efforts between all the partners involved and others, can be found in the related links section on the right.
The project was 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 ran for 3.5 years with the ambition to facilitate transformative changes within the global economy to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. The project partner consortium was 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.
Newsletter Library
During the course of the project, 6 newsletters have been published. These newsletters continue to be available for interested readers.
