Nature and Biodiversity Reporting
“Even if you are only interested in dollars and cents, we can see that conserving and restoring nature is now very often the best bet for human prosperity”
Background
Nature plays a fundamental role in sustaining humanity, providing us with the food, water, energy, and materials we need to survive, whilst enabling an almost incalculable number of complex processes and functions that allow our social and economic systems to thrive. Loss of nature and biodiversity pose major risks to human societies, with threats linked to health, food insecurity, the development of medicines, climate regulation and carbon sequestration.
Loss of nature also poses a significant risk to the global economy, whether directly through physical dependence of businesses on nature for their materials, operations, supply chain performance and business continuity, or indirectly through secondary impacts such as loss of customers and markets or financial impacts due to legal and regulatory issues. Estimates suggest more than half of the world’s total GDP – US$44tn of economic value generation - is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services (WEF, 2020).
Reporting Requirements
The UK’s FCA and other key regulators are looking to incorporate nature into sustainability reporting requirements in the future. This is likely to be structured around the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework. Though this is currently voluntary, it’s widely expected to become mandatory, following the path of TCFD.
In light of this growing need, we’ve compiled a guide to the main frameworks and approaches for calculating and disclosing nature dependencies, risks and impacts, along with guidance on upcoming regulation, biodiversity metrics, and key questions and responses to nature focused due diligence questions. We also provide key resources to get you started with understanding nature and biodiversity.
If you’d like to speak to us about biodiversity and nature reporting, and how it might affect your organisation, get in touch.