This week we are diving into 5 stories on creating business demand for nature resilience; collaboration for resilience and insurability; a metric to measure nature risk; embedding biodiversity in procurement; and tools for nature reporting.
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Nature-based solutions can reduce flood, drought and pollution risks for UK businesses, yet investment in them remains fragmented and small scale. The core challenge is weak and inconsistent demand for what nature-based solutions deliver, not a shortage of capital, so they lack the steady revenue investors need. This Green Finance Institute report looks at how to build that demand, with businesses as buyers of resilience outcomes. For example, Network Rail worked out what it would save in maintenance, repairs and disruption from upstream flood work in the farmer-led Evenlode scheme, and helped fund the scheme. [Read more]
Adequate, affordable insurance for your site increasingly depends on the resilience of the place around it, not only the site itself. While investing in storm drainage, natural flood defences and wildfire buffers benefits many, the bill may land on a few, leaving no single organisation with the incentive or capacity to act alone. This playbook from the WEF and Marsh sets out four areas where coalitions can act together, and several of them make the business case of nature. For example, The Nature Conservancy and Marsh Re found that adding green wildfire buffers around Paradise, California, cut losses by 27% in an insurance pricing model. [Read more]
Water, healthy soils, storm protection and other resources a business relies on rarely appear in its financial analysis. Hannah Simons, Head of Sustainable Finance & Transition at Lloyds Corporate & Institutional, says counting these dependencies in financial analysis can help “turn an invisible risk into something that can be actively managed”. Developed in association with Lloyds, this report shows how Nature Value at Risk works, a metric estimating the share of a site’s value at risk in a severe but plausible year. In a case study, two US data centres run by the same company had an estimated 13.1% and 8.8% of revenue at risk from water supply, largely because one depends on mountain snow. [Read more]
Biodiversity loss poses a direct threat to supply chain continuity, because ecosystem damage in sourcing regions disrupts the supply of raw materials. The UN Global Compact’s Sustainable Procurement Implementation Framework gives procurement teams biodiversity actions at every stage. Actions span three progress levels, from Initial Action to Advanced Practice, so a team coming to this new or trying to improve can find its entry point. Discover how to ask in tenders where suppliers’ sites are and whether they affect threatened species, score bids on biodiversity and write clauses ruling out operations in protected areas. [Read more]
Nature reporting frameworks expect organisations to identify and disclose their nature-related impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities. Yet nature varies by location, so no single dataset, model or platform can provide a complete picture. Over 200 tools now exist, and choosing and combining them can confuse an accountant or risk manager new to sustainability. Lancaster University’s Pentland Centre shows how to combine tools into a nature tool stack, where each tool serves a distinct purpose and the result of one feeds the next. It sorts tools into five categories, and for each one it gives examples and a key limitation. [Discover here]
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To collaborate with fellow changemakers solving challenges and sharing solutions. Apply to join the FuturePlanet community here ⬇