A major new report has called on policymakers to drive “systemic change in financial systems” to reduce damage to the natural world.
In what one investor called an “historic moment”, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (IPBES) on Monday approved its Methodological assessment report on the impact and dependence of business on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.
IPBES is often described as the nature-focused equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose research and recommendations underpin the Paris Agreement.
This is the first time the body has dealt explicitly with the role of the private sector in one of its reports, and the findings are based on contributions from leading scientists, and approved by 150 governments.
“For businesses to play a central role to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, the current conditions in which they operate need to be fundamentally changed to provide businesses with incentives for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity,” it concluded.
To achieve this, governments and businesses must “drive systemic change in financial systems to minimise harm, address drivers of loss, and align returns with positive outcomes for biodiversity and society”.
Many of its key messages centre on measuring the impacts and dependencies of businesses on nature. Various methodologies and data sets already exist, it noted, but their application and uptake are low and inconsistent among the private sector.
The report culminated in more than 100 examples of how policymakers and businesses could start taking action.
Thomas Viegas, the group head of nature at Aviva, said the findings were “too clear to ignore”, and that the paper’s release marked an “historical moment”.
“The assessment highlights that while nature underpins all economic activity, biodiversity and ecosystem services are in steep decline,” he wrote on social media.
“It makes clear that all businesses and financial institutions both depend on and impact nature, making nature degradation a growing systemic risk to economic, financial and societal stability.
Yet most private sector decisions fail to account for nature, reinforced by economic and policy conditions that incentivise harmful practices far more than positive ones.
IPBES’s work comes just weeks after the UK’s Institute for Sustainability and Environmental Professionals, which represents governments, business and finance, recommended that natural capital should be “formally recognised as critical national infrastructure”.
