The European Business & Biodiversity Platform works with EU companies and other interested stakeholders to help them assess, commit, transform and disclose their relationship with nature to foster the transition to a nature positive society.
Many businesses, from micro-enterprises to multinationals with large supply chains, rely on natural resources and healthy ecosystems. The decline of biodiversity puts their business at risk, as well as their financial investors.
For who?
The Platform engages directly with its corporates, including SMEs, financial institutions and business networks to co-create solutions and turn risks into opportunities. Our activities target different groups of organisations.
The protection of biodiversity needs to become a concern for all businesses and not just a few. If you are looking for inspiring case studies from SMEs, access initial guidance on biodiversity in business or want to get involved in future onboarding calls, click here
The landscape of tools and methods to assess a business relationship with nature is rapidly evolving. If you are a corporate or financial institution and are looking for guidance on how to measure biodiversity, reduce your impact, take positive action or nature or address your data challenges, click here.
Hundreds of forward-thinking businesses have already made commitments and are taking action to help reverse nature loss. You can join them too. When making a commitment for nature you need to consider two important steps:
1) Understand how your business impacts and relies on nature to make sure your commitments have the greatest impact.
2) Make informed commitments through credible platforms.
Various commitment frameworks exist across Europe at international and national level. Find an overview here. If you are aware of another commitment framework, reach out to EUBB_Platform
icf [dot] com (EUBB_Platform[at]icf[dot]com)
Financial institutions cannot wait to take action on biodiversity. While being exposed to risks associated with biodiversity loss, they also have a strong leveraging power to seize the related opportunities. The Platform has been at the forefront of the engagement with the financial sector. If you are a financial institution and would like to know more or engage in this work, click here.
The Platform organises regular webinars and events that are open to its Community. Visit our Homepage to know more about our upcoming webinars and events.
The Align project aims to co-develop recommendations for a standard on biodiversity measurements and valuation, and guide business in its implementation. Find out more about the Align project here.
Every year, the Platform organises the European Business & Nature Summit (EBNS), a high-level political and technical forum to mobilise the business community to take action on nature. Don't miss the next edition of the Summit next year!
The Platform works closely with national and regional business and biodiversity platforms and networks to accelerate our transition to a nature positive society. Click here for more information.
Biodiversity increasingly finds its way into policy developments and frameworks supporting the transformation of business and finance. The Platform offers a unique interface for business to understand policy requirements and interact with policymakers. We are regularly sounding our Community about the policy needs and sharing latest developments in this field through webinars.
In 2022, the EU B@B Platform developed a Thematic Report providing a ‘current working definition’ of what nature positive means in a business context. The working definition is based on outcomes of a webinar series as well as on a review of position papers, academic papers and discussion papers. The Thematic Report provides meaningful clarifications embodied in 10 principles:
- Nature positive is a collective effort
- The full scope of nature needs to be covered
- Material impacts of the value and within the spheres of influence need to be covered
- Positive impacts need to outweigh negative impacts
- Nature positive needs to be implemented in full compliance with the mitigation hierarchy and complemented by conservation measures
- Targets and actions should be ambitious, science-based and integrated, and measured
- Potential need for transformation of production processes or business models
- The nature positive ambition needs to be endorsed by the Board
- Nature positive requires immediate actions
- Communicate in full transparency
The ‘current working definition’ applies to any company that is adopting or has adopted a nature positive strategy or ambition, which means that they credibly contribute to the Global Goal for Nature.
A first version of the working definition has been tested with businesses by means of 9 case studies which were presented and discussed in a dedicated webinar series.
An introductory webinar on the concept of ‘nature positive’ in a business context took place in May 2022 (see slides).
The webinar of 15 September 2022 (see slides and recording) presented the cases of Schneider Electric, ASN Bank and Spadel.
The webinar of 22 September 2022 (see slides and recording) presented the cases of Vattenfall, Barrat Homes, Transport for London and Nuveen Natural Capital.
The webinar of 29 September 2022 (see slides and recording) presented the cases of Oxford University and CEMBUREAU.
During the 2022 European Business and Nature Summit (EBNS) an updated version of the working definition was presented (see slides).
Focusing on the different nature components (climate/atmosphere, water, biodiversity and land/soil) the case studies showed that businesses are most confident in becoming neutral (or positive) on climate, even throughout their value chain. Focusing on the value chain, businesses generally believe that they can achieve nature positive in their direct operations. They are less confident for their upstream and downstream operations. Traceability is a key challenge for achieving nature positive supply chains.
Tackling nature loss is a collective endeavour. It requires a whole-of-society approach and business and finance have a critical role to play regardless of the outcome of the current Global Biodiversity Framework negotiations. If we are serious about our ambitions to reach the Global Goal for Nature by 2030, concepts like nature positive should be embraced.