Align language used among measurement approaches and provide outreach and guidance to ensure understandability by business - CDC Biodiversité contribution

2021 is a super year for biodiversity at the international with the new targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity for the 2021-2030 period. Based on science-based targets, framework for biodiversity focuses on negotiating goals and targets concerning 1) the state of biodiversity; 2) drivers of biodiversity loss; and 3) tools & solutions to drive action.

In this context, biodiversity footprint tools are necessary to actively consider, or “mainstream” biodiversity across sectors, and to involve private and public actors. By measuring the impacts of businesses and financial assets across value chains, such tools can highlight actions to effectively reduce pressures on biodiversity. Their use of aggregate metrics can also facilitate the assessment of the contribution of businesses to the achievement of global targets. This is an area with synergies between biodiversity protection and society.

Today, a growing number of businesses and financial institutions is committing to ambitious biodiversity targets such as ‘becoming nature positive’ or ‘zero net loss’ by a certain timeline e.g. 2030. Other companies or public authorities are committing to be compliant to science-based targets for nature. This reflects an increased acknowledgement of the importance of nature by the private and public communities, which is also fueled by initiatives on the alignment between measurement approaches. This guidance could be built upon by Parties in the context of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework and adapted to support implementation of existing national-level mandatory and voluntary reporting requirements.

The question of measuring the loss and gain of biodiversity is now indispensable in a world of constant uncertainty, and where global limits are permanently challenging our daily lives. Today, it is essential to carry out ambitious work on supplying and sharing of data related to biodiversity to enable businesses and public authorities to consider it more deeply, in particular through its integration into national strategies.

These data now make it possible to develop scoring tools, such as the Global Biodiversity Score, set up by CDC Biodiversité upon request of Caisse des Dépôts. To reach international targets, investigate emerging biodiversity measurement and disclosure approaches and support their uptake by business are essential. By supporting the adoption of biodiversity measurement approaches, the IPBES could enable businesses and financial institutions to determine their impacts and dependencies on biodiversity in a structured and standardized way. Most businesses are calling for aggregate metrics to support their decision-making, strategy, and reporting. The IPBES report should support the emergence of robust and relevant aggregate metrics, complementary to more specific and « elementary » metrics.

This common view contributes to align the language used among these measurement approaches and provide outreach and guidance to ensure they are understandable by business. In addition, third-party assessments (from IPBES) could review the functionality and performance of the approaches to ensure they are robust and appropriate for their stated use. Initiatives such as the EU Business@Biodiversity Platform (“Assessment of Biodiversity Measurements Approaches for Businesses and financial institutions”, 2021), Aligning Biodiversity Measures for Business collaboration (“Biodiversity measures for Business - Corporate biodiversity measurement, reporting and disclosure within the current and future global policy context”, 2020) and the Biological Diversity Protocol could help the IPBES in these efforts.

The IPBES process highlight the importance of good reporting practices, for instance, through supporting the development of sector guidance on common issues and risks that should be reported on. Even reporting on climate impacts – a more advanced area of environmental reporting – shows that the depth and strategic level of reporting is not well developed, even though broadly accepted standards are now available.

Thus, the improvement of scoring tools is an essential element, which allows public and private actors to capitalize on the actions implemented and to assess their impacts on biodiversity without starting from scratch. With the support of a single metric such as the MSA (Mean species abundance), the definition of a quantified goals is now possible and accordingly, economic actors will be able to act in order to reach them. The IPBES Process is thus an opportunity to bring together in a single place a diversity of actors all willing to preserve biodiversity and who are more and more committed in that way. Exchanging on the convergence of tools needed to this mission, on the issues of ecological equivalence, and questioning the appropriate scale for action as well as the measurement of biodiversity gain is an excellent way to do so.

CDC Biodiversité is a direct subsidiary of the Caisse des Dépôts (CDC, the French largest public financial institution with €166 billion in assets managed for the general interest) and has been demonstrating for over 10 years the group’s desire to innovate in the general interest by creating new economic models that can contribute to the conservation of biodiversity.

CDC Biodiversité is sharing its leading experience and innovative tools with scientific, institutional, and private stakeholders: offset banking, climate change adaptation projects through the Nature 2050 program and a biodiversity footprint assessment tool, the “Global Biodiversity Score” or GBS. The GBS aims to provide the biodiversity counterpart of the equivalent CO2 ton and to measure the impacts of economic activities on ecosystems along the value chain. The development of the GBS is supported in the Business for Positive Biodiversity (B4B+) Club, a club of businesses and financial institutions engaged in the process of assessing and limiting their impacts on biodiversity. The main objective of the Club is to co-develop and road-test the methodology at the corporate level for businesses and portfolio level for FIs. Lessons learnt from the B4B+ Club contributed significantly to this publication.