How could such an assessment best support the businesses regarding biodiversity

Posted by Julien CALAS on
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Last seen 09/01/2023
Joined 03/06/2016

1- Businesses are confused at the moment in choosing one metric amongst the numerous metrics initiatives.

About the issue with improving comprehensiveness of metric approaches, can IPBES try to look if there's any scientific comparative review of metrics initiative ? The issue is that, as Bianca pointed out in its presentation at the online conference, there is many metric cases studies out there now, but they are 1 metric / 1 company.

IPBES review should look at how many scientific work has been implemented to apply different metrics to the same business product, companies, value added chain and in doing so, be able to assess comparative advantages and disadvantages of the different metrics approaches.

 

2- IPBES assessment can help the mains players to know how they can use Metrics to monitor biodiversity impact and dependencies:

  • Finance regulators / Central Banks and Minister of Finances : they are drivers to the finance institutions. TNFD will provide soon recommandations on how to better assess biodiversity risks.  IPBES can play a role providing information on how data and models can help assess sector’s dependencies and impacts on biodiversity. As putted in the 1st day session, Dependencies is the easier, but what science review on better assessing impacts at the sector level ?

 

  • Finance institutions : Will the IPBES report take care to distinguish assessment metrics for companies and for financial institutions ?  The premises are that financial institutions have to assess companies they invest in and they play a powerful drive in financial flows and transformative changes. Some recommendations adapted to those both sectors and their complementarities can help a lot. One key aspect is to clarify how the metrics for businesses and metrics for financial institutions can be encapsulated in one another.

As pointed out by Matt Jones, it is also key to understand that there isn’t one single finance sector. It is key to understand the role of development banks in opening the way to the mainstream-commercial banks.

 

  • Companies metrics (cf. point 1 above)
  • Consumers / citizens. What science tell about the impact on improved companies biodiversity disclosure and consumers preferences / incentives ? What are the benefits for companies ?