Event: Join us for the Energy Transition Summit 2025

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Business For Biodiversity Ireland is partnering with the Business Post Energy Transition Summit 2025 on October 15 – bringing together key voices to discuss topics around the transition in Dublin’s Croke Park.

As noted in a recent National Economic and Social Council (NESC) report, the energy transition will not only help to address urgent environmental concerns but will also deliver substantial economic benefits through enterprise opportunities, by improving the reliability of energy supply, lowering energy costs and enabling Ireland to become a net exporter of energy.

As part of this partnership, members can enjoy an exclusive 15% discount on tickets by using the promo code: energy15 at checkout: https://events.businesspost.ie/event/energy-summit/

Hosted by broadcaster Ivan Yates, the agenda will feature Tara Connolly, Programme Lead for Energy Markets and Grids, Beyond Fossil Fuel, with a keynote address on policy risks from Dr. Cathal Fitzgerald, Senior Analyst, and fireside chats with Alan Rossiter, Head of Strategy & Network Development, ESB Networks and Ali Sheridan, Chair of the Just Transition Commission as well as expert panel sessions.

Sponsors of the event include BFBI Strategy Track member ESB Networks, Bord Gais Energy, Schneider Electric, BYD Energy Ireland, Certa, Hydrogen Ireland, Sustainability Online business news platform, Solar Ireland, Sandyford.com, Energy Storage Ireland, Irish Energy Storage Association and Wind Energy Ireland.

Register now and join us on the day for a chat at the BFBI exhibition stand to discuss our work helping businesses to transition to Nature Positive and connect with our Business Development Lead Dr Maria Fitzpatrick: https://energysummit.ie/

Strategy Track Workshop 3: bringing it all together

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Following on from earlier Strategy Track workshops, where we focused on the key elements of what a Nature Ambition Statement is (and why every organisation should have one!) and how to set SMART nature targets, BFBI Business Programme Lead Dr Catherine Farrell CIEEM, Trinity College Dublin, writes on the final in-person workshop of 2025 for our businesses in this track where we outlined how to bring all the different components together.

In our first workshop of the year, we outlined the need for in-depth understanding of our business impacts and dependencies on nature, and importantly, where these occur along the business value chain. Armed with insights to our value chain and following the steady guidance of the ACT-D framework  (along with resources such as the WWF Corporate Nature Targets publication, and the Science Based Targets Network framework (with lots of great resources / videos), we began to think about targets.

But, exploring the idea of targets unlocks a whole suite of ensuant questions – should our targets be based on actions or outcomes; resources applied or timeline to get there; and which part of the value chain should we focus on?

Our advice? Stop, take a deep breath and focus on one impact to start with. What could we do to enhance biodiversity at our direct operations? Could we then look further and think about procurement of raw materials – could we set a target to work with our suppliers and collaborate to reduce impacts / drivers of biodiversity loss at source?

Once we start exploring and collaborating, the innovation begins. And innovation is what drives sustainable business forward, to future proof and avoid nature related risk.

The challenge then lies in monitoring and reporting: rather than re-invent wheels take a practical approach and measure what matters, where; and build from there. In our workshop, we explored natural capital accounting methods to build information – showing how knowledge of the stocks and flows help inform decision making and importantly transition planning. Checking how we communicate these targets relative to our Nature Ambition Statement will help to keep us on course.

The team at Business for Biodiversity Ireland extend their gratitude to the Sustainable Futures team at KPMG; thanks also to our hosts Bank Of Ireland, for looking after us at their Baggot Street Head Office. As previous, we followed the guidance for the accelerator programme for businesses set out by Business for Nature under the Commit phase of their ACT-D framework.

Join the Nature Strategy Accelerator Programme for 2026! Sign up on our site or contact our Business Development Manager Dr Maria Fitzpatrick to discuss the options for your business: manager@businessforbiodiversity.ie

 

 

Sign up today for our next Discovery Track webinar

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What are your business’s impacts and dependencies on nature? What are the potential risks in your supply chain from nature loss and climate issues? The third Business For Biodiversity Ireland Discovery Track webinar of 2025 is coming on Wednesday, September 24, and will address how to tackle these questions when it comes to your business decisions.

Discovery webinars are free to all BFBI subscribers – sign up today to register for this and future Discovery webinars to learn more about the crucial issues facing Irish businesses in the evolving sustainability landscape. The Discovery Track, the first step on our 4-Track Nature Strategy Accelerator Programme, is free to join for guidance on the evolving frameworks and stategy you need to ensure business resilience and longevity.

This Teams webinar (from 9.30am to 10.20am) will cover how the ACT-D Framework (Assess, Commit, Transform & Disclose) is a vital tool for assessing your business’s impacts and dependencies on nature, including upstream and downstream value chain relationships. The framework is aligned with current global best-practice from Business for Nature, Capitals Coalition, WBCSD, TNFD, Science Based Targets  Network, WEF and WWF.

Register here (and find past and future Discovery webinars and curated resources in the members menu): Join the Discovery Track

Resistance to regulatory rollback on nature laws

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Resistance is growing from the business community and civil society on EU plans to roll back recently introduced laws on corporate sustainability reporting intended to help halt and reverse the degradation of nature, amid lobbying by opposing political forces, with fingers now pointing at US involvement.

As the European Union heads into the final phase of negotiations on the Omnibus Package, it has confirmed that plans to scale back core elements are part of an upcoming trade agreement with the United States. Business For Nature reports that the new EU-U.S. tariff statement pledged that European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), as well as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) will be adjusted so they “do not pose undue restrictions on transatlantic trade”.

However, over 400 businesses, investors and organisations have warned that weakening CSRD and CSDDD risks undermining competitiveness and long-term growth. Signatories, including the Corporate Leaders Group and Eurosif consider that regulatory simplification can be achieved without drastically compromising on the substance of sustainability rules. Read their recommendations, including advice to retain a double materiality approach HERE.

The amended European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) draft of the ESRS is currently up for public consultation until September 29, 2025 and stakeholders – including sustainability experts, investors and national authorities – are invited to share their views. EFRAG will also organise outreach events throughout September and October to gather further feedback ahead of its final technical advice to the European Commission, due by November 30, 2025. Read the draft and amendments here and submit your thoughts via survey.

Meanwhile the European Commission is wrapping up its Call For Evidence feedback period on the matter on September 10. For those with less time or in-depth technical knowledge to review the documents who wish to express their concerns to the EC, the #HandsOfNature Campaign led by environmental groups including the European Environmental Bureau, WWF and BirdLife Europe, and in Ireland, the Irish Environmental Pillar/Irish Environmental Network and Irish Wildlife Trust have a campaign to enable concerned citizens to have their say, including an online tool with sample text you can add to or adjust to state your thoughts on keeping the regulations robust.

Join top changemakers for Climate Carnival 2025

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Business For Biodiversity Ireland is partnering with Climate Cocktail Club for an exciting event, Climate Carnival 2025.
The two-day event takes place in Co. Laois on September 29–30, 2025 in the idyllic Ballintubbert Gardens & House with up to 1,000 changemakers in attendance from across business, creative, science and activist sectors, with 10 performers and 60 world-class speakers across four stages and five immersive zones.
Billed as the event where ‘Bold, Brave Leadership Comes to Ireland’, Climate Carnival is designed to spark new connections, courageous conversation and bold solutions for climate, nature and communities. Expect interactive workshops, creative performances and sessions, live music, guided walks and talks, and an array of food, drink and exhibition options. The BFBI team will be there with an exhibition stand to answer questions about our work.

Headline speakers and performers include:

  • Blindboy, Podcaster and writer
  • Hafsat Abiola-Costello, Co-founder of Project Dandelion
  • Dr Easkey Britton, Author and ocean advocate
  • Dr Tara Shine, CEO of Change by Degrees
  • Willem Ferwerda, Founder of Commonland
  • Troy Armour, CEO of Junk Kouture
  • Anja Murray, Broadcaster and author
  • Plus musical performances from Liam Ó Maonlaí, Jerry Fish, Ceara Conway and more to be announced.
Highlights:
– September 29 – Climate Dinner: an evening of live music, local food and an inspirational keynote by Chair of Natural England Tony Juniper.
– September 30 – Carnival: over 30 interactive sessions to craft your own impact agenda, including speed networking, talks, comedy and live music.

Founder of Climate Cocktail Club and event curator Tom Popple said:

“This is not just another ESG conference, it is a radical reimagining of what a networking and insight event should really be about – people and impact…it’s for everyone from lonely climate leaders to fully fledged sustainability teams, for business professionals to impact entrepreneurs.”

Tickets: https://www.climatecocktailclub.org/events-1/climate-carnival-1-bold-brave-leadership

Webinar: Introducing the Nature-Based Enterprise

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BFBI is delighted to announce an introductory webinar on new market opportunities in nature-based solutions.

This webinar is organised in collaboration with the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform which brings together communities of nature-based enterprises, working with and for nature. These businesses are experiencing high market demand as they deliver nature-based solutions which help to address business dependencies and risks from nature loss and climate change. 

Whether you are interested in benefiting from nature-based solutions to climate adaptation, developing new products and services, you are a start-up business in this area, or you will have businesses like these in your supply chain, this webinar provides a good understanding of how your business can participate in the nature positive economy and go nature positive! 

Webinar date: August 20th, 2025
Time: 12-1pm
Via Teams: Register HERE

Our speaker: Isobel Fletcher is CEO of Horizon Nua, a not-for-profit foundation based in Dublin working to accelerate the just transition towards a nature-positive economy and manager of the Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform. An advocate for nature-based entrepreneurship, Isobel leads the team working to co-develop nature-positive entrepreneurial strategies at regional and municipal level through multiple European initiatives to support the delivery of nature-based solutions as part of the just transition to an equitable, carbon neutral and nature-positive economy. Isobel is a member of the EC NbS Task forces on the nature-positive economy and communications. 

 

‘Quick fix’ for companies on sustainability reporting

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The European Commission has adopted targeted “quick fix” amendments to the first set of European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). This is aimed at reducing the burden and increasing certainty for companies that had to start reporting for financial year 2024 (commonly referred to as “wave one” companies).

According to the current ESRS, companies reporting on financial year 2024 can omit information on, amongst other things, the anticipated financial effects of certain sustainability‑related risks. The “quick fix” amendment, which applies from financial year 2025, will allow them to omit that same information for financial years 2025 and 2026.

For financial years 2025 and 2026, wave one companies with more than 750 employees will benefit from most of the same phase-in provisions that currently apply to companies with up to 750 employees. A summary of the modifications can be found here.

Wave one companies were not captured by the “stop‑the‑clock” Directive, which delayed sustainability reporting requirements for companies that report from financial year 2025 and 2026 (so‑called “wave two” and “wave three” companies) by two years. This Directive was part of the Omnibus I package adopted by the Commission in February 2025.

The Commission is working on a broader revision of the ESRS, with the aim of substantially reducing the number of data requirements, clarifying provisions deemed unclear and improving consistency with other pieces of legislation. It is expected that this review will be completed by financial year 2027.

Despite the ongoing delays and simplifications at EU level, assessing and reporting on your organisation’s nature impacts is still a vital and urgent part of any organisation’s long-term strategy – ignoring your dependencies and impacts on nature means ignoring the potential risks, both financial and reputational, to your business as well as the physical risks that damaging and degrading nature does to our planet, society and to your business’s resilience and longevity.

You can be a leader in your field by tackling these issues now – we’ll show you where to start. Sign up to our Nature Strategy Accelerator Programme today – join the Discovery Track for free to learn more – or contact our Business Development Manager Dr Maria Fitzpatrick for a chat on how to get started on a solid Nature Strategy for your organisation. We will be accepting new businesses to our Action and Strategy Tracks now ahead of our 2026 programme of workshops, peer learning and expert one-on-one guidance – email manager@businessforbiodiversity.ie

Good news! BFBI 2026 Track Memberships Now Open

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We are thrilled to announce the opening of memberships for our 2026 Action and Strategy Accelerator Tracks!

Starting in the summer of 2025, we will welcome new members to these cohorts of Irish businesses who are advancing along our Nature Strategy Accelerator Programme – providing a unique opportunity to evaluate your organisation’s readiness for a Double Materiality Assessment (on the Action Track) or to level up to craft a comprehensive Nature Strategy (Strategy Track).

New members will engage in a personalised assessment meeting with the BFBI team, receiving tailored guidance to bridge knowledge gaps and initiate impactful actions within your business.

In 2026, each track will feature three immersive full-day workshops, in collaboration with Deloitte‘s WorldClimate (Action) & KPMG Sustainable Futures (Strategy) Teams, and further personalised one-on-one calls as needed. Together, we’ll tackle key milestones, allowing each business to progress at a pace that aligns with their unique capacity and timelines.

BFBI is supported by National Parks & Wildlife Services. Find out more about the various Nature Strategy Accelerator tracks on our How It All Works page and get in touch with our Business Development Manager Dr Maria Fitzpatrick to discuss the options for your business, including grants aligned with our fees – email today manager@businessforbiodiversity.ie

Participate in ‘The Business of Nature Positive’ at Trinity

Would you like to participate in The Business of Nature Positive?

BFBI Business Programme Lead, Dr Catherine Farrell CIEEM is an Assistant Professor of Business & Nature at Trinity College Dublin. This past academic year in Trinity Business School, she and a group of students engaged with businesses from a broad range of sectors in Ireland for a new module, The Business of Nature Positive.

From SME to major legal firms, to real estate to aviation, 34 students worked with 15 businesses to build understanding of their impacts and dependencies on nature, and how they can address nature-related risks, as well as explore opportunities through nature-positive actions. You can read more about the module, which is supported by the Business for Biodiversity Ireland team, here, and sign up after reading the full Expression of Interest document below.

Here are some of the testimonials from the Sustainability Champion Leads that engaged with us this year to inspire you to participate – whether your business is just one person / a small team or large scale, size does not matter:

Engaging with the students through the course was valuable to us as it provided an impetus to tackle the real challenges we must overcome. Coming from outside our domain was also useful as they were able to provide a different perspective. – Jane, Trinity College Dublin.

 

This was a really rewarding experience. The module was run very professionally and the students’ level of engagement exceeded expectations, as did the output which will be very complimentary to our sustainability strategy around biodiversity. – Neil, Hibernia Real Estate.

 

Working with our students helped put our efforts and plans into perspective… Their ideas to expand nature-positive businesses – especially their most simple ideas – have inspired. – Patrick, Notre Dame Dublin.

 

I would definitely encourage any business to get involved, the students have so much knowledge and come with lots of ideas about embedding sustainability. The end report is written specifically for your organisation which was insightful and well written. Overall, a great experience and hopefully the students thought it was useful too! – Dee, Chartered Accountants Ireland.

 

A very positive experience, as the students were really engaged and interested. I think they learned a lot from this initiative, as did we! – Megan, Native Events.

 

It has been a great pleasure working with the students and collaborating with Dr Catherine Farrell. Viewing our business from a different perspective has been incredibly valuable. We hope The Shannon Airport Group can continue to collaborate with Trinity College in the future. – Arek, The Shannon Airport Group.

 

It was a pleasure to work with the students of the Business of Nature Positive module at Trinity Business School under the guidance of Dr Catherine Farrell. The programme provided me with hands-on practical experience … and the resulting report will be a very useful tool in our biodiversity strategy for the future. For businesses that have not yet started evaluating their biodiversity-related impacts, risks and opportunities this is a valuable programme and one I can highly recommend. – Lorraine, A&L Goodbody.

The call for businesses to engage with this year’s student (academic year 2025-2026) is now open – an opportunity for you to learn more about sustainability reporting for your business – read the Expression of Interest PDF linked below with full details of what’s involved below and sign up HERE.

Poster in dark red with white text and logos

Expression of Interest: TBS Nature positive module 4_6_2025

Assess: How your business interfaces with nature

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BFBI Business Programme Lead Dr Catherine Farrell CIEEM, Trinity College Dublin, writes on the process steps around undertaking a Double Materiality Assessment (DMA) to help guide your nature strategy: this article focuses on the ways to understand how businesses interface with nature, highlighting the data needs but also the language of a DMA.

Following from our inspiring and interactive workshop on March 10th (read about it here), alongside colleagues from Deloitte, the Business for Biodiversity Ireland team led the second of our Action Track workshop series on May 20th. While our initial workshop focused on the key elements of what a Double Materiality Assessment (DMA) is (and/or isn’t), especially the value chain, this time we focused on how we can map and track the interface of business with nature.

This involves homing in on ‘the where’ part of the DMA process. In essence, this means gathering your organisation’s location data like maps, and – in tandem – figuring out the other types of data available, what they measure and why. Then its time to focus on how we might use data (which may be freely available as well as company-held) to inform our DMA. Our colleagues from Deloitte shared their DMA journey, highlighting how tools like the TNFD LEAP (Locate, Evaluate, Assess and Prepare), can help bring understanding of our business interfaces with nature to light.

In this article we focus more on data and the language of data and DMA (beware of the acronyms!):

Data: we hear a lot about data these days, but when we’re trying to understand our business impacts and dependencies (how we rely on nature) we really need to focus on data relating to aspects of nature referenced in the nature-related reporting frameworks like CSRD, TNFD, SBTN and GRI.

We can start by breaking these into –

  • Locational data (a map of where we operate – note, start with one part of your value chain and get the hang of it!)
  • What types of habitats or ecosystems are present in those places (the basic type and their extent)
  • What our impact is on these specific areas of ecosystem (how we influence their condition), and
  • How we rely on them (what we need from these ecosystems as inputs, aka ecosystem services to our operations) or impact them.

This helps us Locate, Evaluate and Assess our impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities, and then Prepare to report (think LEAP). We can do this by using available data on habitats, but -now, a health warning – in Ireland habitat data is quite limited. With some ecological input to help, however, we can gather up what is available, in a useful way.

Language: ecological and nature lingo is nuanced but not beyond our reach. It’s helpful to have someone working with us that can communicate these nuances in a clear, simple way. During our workshop we discovered that acronyms and strange ‘eco’ languages can be off putting initially, but once we get into the flow, we find what we need to know.

Many thanks to Aoife Connaughton and Deloitte for collaborating on this workshop, National Biodiversity Data Centre’s Sarah Kelly, and all our Action Track businesses for participating in our Nature Strategy Accelerator Programme, including CIE and CIE Tours, Cloud Assist, Irish Rail, Irish Trees, Future Energy Ireland, KMK, Scott Cawley Ltd, Shannon Airport, Trinity College Dublin and Watermark Coffee.

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