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Nature Is
Everybody’s Business
- Unlocking Ambition,
Alliances and Investment Pathways for a
Nature-Positive World at World Biodiversity Summit
2023 | |
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With a pressing need to
mainstream biodiversity across business, finance,
government and civil society, a large and highly
motivated crowd gathered at World Biodiversity
Summit 2023 on 21 September in New York
during Climate Week NYC and the UN General
Assembly. The crowd was full of new faces
interested in acting, addressing and facing the
challenge of biodiversity loss. Returning after
last year’s successful three-part series, the
Summit solidified itself as the main cross-sector
event on biodiversity and nature in the world.
Nature and biodiversity have a new crowd with a
different lens.
Last year, we had the
Paris moment for nature in Montreal at the UNCBD
COP15. And by now, we all know that we need to
work across sectors to foster innovation,
investments and policy reform. World Biodiversity
Summit brought together a very motivated group of
people from various sectors to bridge the gap in
global collaboration and to unpack it, action area
by action area, to find out what needs to happen
next to implement the Global Biodiversity
Framework.
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Key
Conclusions
Business Action
for Nature – A Growing
Imperative: The interdependence of
business on nature was underscored throughout the
sessions of the day, highlighting nature
conservation as an emergent priority for the
business sector. As articulated by H.E.
Razan Al Mubarak, the UN Climate Change High-Level
Champion for COP28, the economic
implications of biodiversity loss are
stark and a nature-positive economy has the
potential to create 400 million jobs.
Leading
up to COP28, the Climate Champions team is calling
to non-state actors to put nature at the heart of
climate action by committing to five key
principles:
- Commit
to science-based targets for both climate and
nature.
- Integrate
nature into climate transition
plans.
- Assess
the impacts and dependencies through the
recommendations of both the Taskforce on
Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)
and the Taskforce on Nature-Related
Financial Disclosures (TNFD).
- Eliminate
commodity-driven deforestation.
- Instead
of just extracting value from nature, invest in
nature-based solutions.
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Recognising &
Financing the Invaluable Value of
Nature: The Summit highlighted
the need for a shared understanding and common
language on biodiversity across government,
finance and science sectors for effective
collaboration and decision-making. Martin
Præstegaard, the CEO
of
ATP, emphasised biodiversity as a
significant risk to the financial sector and
stressed the integration of biodiversity into
financial disclosure. The need to accelerate
information flow on the benefits of financing
nature and accurately price proxies, reflecting
both climate change and biodiversity, is more
critical than ever for advancing nature
markets. | |
Bridging Climate
& Nature: Prof. Dr. Johan
Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for
Climate Impact Research, emphasised
nature's incredible ability to maintain climate
balance by absorbing CO2 as a stress response to
warming. Climate change proves that we have
disrupted this fragile balance by burning fossil
fuels and destroying ecosystems. Our foremost
priority now must be to help nature recover to
continue sequestering greenhouse gases. It is as
clear as it gets: without healthy biodiversity, we
will not achieve our decarbonisation goals.
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Accelerating
Change Through Incentivising Framework &
Policy: The Summit highlighted the
urgent need for transparent, robust policies and
standardised frameworks as catalysts to
incentivise the private sector and expedite our
progress in safeguarding biodiversity. Current
government efforts have fallen short of creating
an enabling environment for businesses alone. In
discussing renewable energy, Rasmus Skov,
the Head of Global External Affairs and
Positioning at Ørsted stressed the
imperative of integrating the biodiversity agenda
into policy frameworks to facilitate its
mainstream adoption.
Shared
Responsibility & Benefits for Water
Stewardship, Regenerative Forestry &
Agriculture: Rethinking land and water
management is crucial for environmental and human
health and climate regulation affecting every
sector. The private sector must adopt a more
integrated nature-people-climate-positive approach
that incorporates the expertise and knowledge of
various stakeholders while providing incentives
for all, including indigenous communities and
farmers.
Amplifying
Indigenous Insights for a Nature-Positive
Future: Inclusion and diversity
in voices, especially indigenous knowledge was a
cornerstone of our discussions. Indigenous
communities hold a reservoir of wisdom on nature
cultivated over generations. This inherent
knowledge can aid biodiversity preservation, land
and water management when integrated with
technologies and embedded in modelling methods,
business and national plans and
more.
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Key
Announcements
From the World
Biodiversity Network
Launching
Nature-Positive Initiatives at
COP28
We are excited to be preparing
a unique announcement at COP28 in Dubai to
launch the Nature Investment Coalition alongside
other meaningful initiatives and building on
our success of the Climate Investment
Coalition.
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Highlights from our
speakers and partners
Ørsted’s
newly released report Uniting action on
climate and biodiversity
highlights biodiversity's crucial role
in renewable energy expansion and equips
policymakers, the energy industry and
environmental NGOs with guidelines for a
nature-positive energy transition.
Capgemini released a set
of recommendations in their report
Preserving the fabric of life: Why biodiversity
loss is as urgent as climate change for the
corporate sector on how to tackle biodiversity
loss and take nature-positive
action.
The TNFD calls for
businesses to disclose and assess their impacts
on nature. In their latest report
Recommendations of the Taskforce on
Nature-related Financial
Disclosures released this week, the
TNFD offers practical recommendations for
businesses to proactively address their impact
on nature.
Pollination
announcement of their inaugural Nature
Finance Focus report. The report
highlights a set of risks and opportunities
derived from the financial sector and assesses
how well-prepared private businesses are to
invest in
nature.
Renewables Grid
Initiative is gearing up to introduce a service
offering technical support to energy
companies seeking to transition to
nature-positive and decarbonised practices, to
be launched at
COP28. | | |
Thank You & Next
Steps
On behalf of the World
Climate Foundation, we would like to extend a big
thank you to everybody involved in World
Biodiversity Summit for your valued
contribution.
Continuing this year,
we are working towards integrating and solidifying
the biodiversity targets into broader climate
negotiations, with COP28 in Dubai serving as a
pivotal moment in the work to reach climate and
biodiversity targets altogether. The key lessons
and takeaways of the day will help drive the
agenda and focus forward and further the
implementation of the Global Biodiversity
Framework, towards COP28 this year and COP16 next
year. | |
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Partners
of World Biodiversity Summit
2023 | |
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| Our mission is to catalyse
the economic transition to a sustainable future
by building cross-sector collaboration,
establishing innovative partnerships and
mobilising investments in climate and
nature-based solutions. Our vision is a
net-zero, nature-positive and healthy planet by
2050 in alignment with the goals of the Paris
Agreement on Climate Change, the Global
Biodiversity Framework and the Sustainable
Development Goals.
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World Climate Foundation. All rights
reserved. Our mailing address
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