Survey on biodiversity skills for sustainable business

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Calling all Irish businesses! Irish and European policy is moving us all toward nature-positive business models and we want to make sure Irish businesses have all the support they need to comply. This short survey will help you to identify the skills, knowledge and competencies that may not yet be represented in your business. 

The results of the survey will allow us to make recommendations to the Skills and Labour Market Research Unit and other relevant entities to ensure the creation of robust interdisciplinary training and educational options to help businesses meet new nature-related reporting responsibilities and accelerate Ireland’s transition to a nature-positive economy.

In partnership with Trinity College Dublin and National Parks and Wildlife Service, this skills gap survey will support Ireland’s National Biodiversity Action Plan (NBAP) 2023-2030.

Please take the survey here – SURVEY LINK

BFBI joins the Nature Positive Forum

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Business For Biodiversity Ireland is pleased to announce that we are joining the Nature Positive Forum.

We are committed to helping secure a nature-positive world – one where there is more biodiversity in 2030 than there was compared to the 2020 baseline – no mean feat considering the rate at which our biodiversity is being degraded and destroyed by human activity and its effect on climate change.

The purpose of the Nature Positive Initiative is to stimulate and support the world in addressing the accelerating biodiversity crisis by meeting the crucial goal of “halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030 from a 2020 baseline and to set the path for full recovery of nature by 2050″. 

The purpose of the Nature Positive Forum is to mobilise a global community, and is open to all relevant institutions, organisations and companies who:

● Commit to upholding the “Global Goal for Nature – Nature Positive“.

● Actively contribute to the Initiative’s goal and objectives in their own activities, and
contribute to and promote its guidance and positions

Read more about Nature Positive Initiative here.
Find out about the Nature Positive Forum here.

Nature Disclosures: Set the Right Foundations

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Our Roadmap to Nature Positive will help you set the right foundations for reporting your nature-related impacts and dependencies under new regulations – it’s also useful if you are considering reporting these voluntarily.

Regardless of current legal obligations, there is a responsibility for all organisations, no matter their size, to understand their impacts and dependencies on nature and take measures to halt and reverse these. Business as usual is not an option, given the decline in global biodiversity and the interlinked climate crisis, the effects of which are already being felt on human health and society, as well as economically. 

First off, you need to know your obligations on nature disclosures. Within the Roadmap – available to BFBI members when you sign up and log in to the Members Area of our site – we look at reporting for different business types and scales. We also outline the relationship between EU Taxonomy and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

Goal 3 provides information on your legal obligations, in particular if your business falls under the scope of CSRD; and if/when your business needs to start reporting. There is a different timeline for companies of various scales, starting in 2024 for certain companies. For businesses that do not currently fall under the scope of CSRD, we outline how it may relate to your business down the line.

Considering the value chain

Many businesses that are not within the scope of CSRD are still part of the value chain (aka Scope 3) of larger organisations. These larger organisations may well request Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) information from their value chain members – and organisations who are not ready for this may find that they lose out when it comes to larger organisations making supplier choices.

Once you know your obligations under the new regulations, the next step will be to explore the reporting standards to find the best fit for your business. Members can check out our Guidance A3.2 on Standardising Reports. Standardised reporting helps organisations increase transparency and communicate their sustainability initiatives.

We’ll give you an overview of the reporting standards that are internationally recognised and aligned with each other with explainers on how all the emerging different policies, frameworks and standards are linked.

Already feeling the overwhelm? Take a breath and have a look at our easy-to-read member guidance documents to give yourself a basic understanding. You’re not expected to be an expert right away and the Platform is here to help. If you have questions, all members are invited to our quarterly Member’s Forum, and you can upload your questions or comments to the online dashboard so that we can discuss them at our meet-ups.

Register here: https://businessforbiodiversity.ie/register-all/

Glossary: Materiality and Double Materiality

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Materiality is the quality of being relevant or significant, and in terms of business and finance, materiality applies to all items that must be recorded or reported in detail in a business’s financial statements as reasonably likely to impact investors’ decision-making. 

Double materiality: For corporate sustainability reporting, the concept of double materiality applies – it goes beyond that which affects the company and its investors, extending to information on how the firm is impacting society and the environment. 

The EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) mandates a double materiality assessment for around 50,000 reporting companies from 2024 onwards. 

The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) explains that a double materiality assessment takes two perspectives, sometimes referred to as an ‘outside in’ / ‘inside out’ approach: 

              (1) an impact perspective “when it pertains to the [entity’s] material actual or potential, positive or negative impacts on people or the environment over the short-, medium- and long-term”; and 

              (2) a financial perspective “if it triggers or could reasonably be expected to trigger material financial effects on the [entity].” 

A double materiality assessment must cover both a business’ own operations as well as upstream and downstream value chain. It must consider the topics and subtopics covered in the 10 ESRS topical standards. These include climate change, pollution, water, biodiversity, circular economy and topics relating to governance and the workforce. 

Detailed reporting on each is required only if the company decides, following a double materiality assessment involving all stakeholders, that it is ‘material’ or relevant under the reporting rules. Where a company determines a topic to not be material, it must explain its rationale in detail. It is still necessary to have a long-term strategy in place to address your organisation’s future impacts and dependencies on nature (and future risks resulting from) biodiversity loss and climate change. 

Read more: https://www.cisl.cam.ac.uk/news/blog/double-materiality-corporate-sustainability-reporting-encompass-societal-and-environmental-impacts 

https://www.charteredaccountants.ie/Accountancy-Ireland/Articles2/Technical/Latest-News/Article-item/the-corporate-sustainability-reporting-directive-getting-to-grips-with-double-materiality 

 

 

 

 

Nature Positive Roadmap: Ask the right questions

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Business for Biodiversity Ireland offers our members an easy-to-follow Roadmap to Nature Positive –  the Assess Phase covers getting started by making a commitment – and another key step is working out where your business stands within a sectoral and organisational context in order to create a solid biodiversity strategy. To do this, you need to know how to ask the right questions.

BFBI members can access our Business Template which will help map out your business model in terms of inputs, activities and outputs. It has been compiled with our community of practice businesses and cross-referenced with prevailing methodology and standards, such as the Global Reporting Initiative and the TNFD LEAP approach.

The Global Reporting Initiative is an independent, international organisation that provides a global common language to communicate environmental impacts with a suite of standards to help businesses report on various aspects of sustainability across regulatory landscapes.

The BFBI Business Template helps unpack your business model with a series of guiding questions, for example:

– What sector are you active within?
– What type of activities are carried out by your business?
– Where are your activities based geographically?

The template goes on to cover your raw materials, your procurement, your land footprint, your water footprint – with recommended tools to calculate these – as well as, you guessed it, your carbon footprint.

Creating a value-chain map

Then you’ll look through your business and value-chain relationships, with more guiding questions, giving you an opportunity to create a value-chain map. Every business has a value chain – you need to also consider what types of activities are undertaken by those with which you have business relationships?

Think about your sector and theirs – what are the nature challenges at local, regional, and global levels related both to your sector and to that of organisations in your value chain: e.g. deforestation, climate change, water stress, pollution, land use, invasive species, natural resource use?

What are the responsibilities with regards to compliance and regulation? These steps on the Roadmap will allow you to create high-level overviews to identify topics material to your business when it comes to new and existing reporting regulations.

This process must be revisited regularly and in consultation with stakeholders and industry experts. The policy landscape is evolving, reflecting the urgency to take action to mitigate risk from the connected biodiversity loss and climate change crises. It is therefore important to be aware of any policy changes that relate to your business, sector and value chain.

The BFBI platform will be on hand with updates – become a member here to access our full Roadmap to Nature Positive.

Next up: Nature Disclosures – knowing your reporting obligations & choosing the right framework

Call for Community of Practice partners: Energy

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Call for partners! We are excited to announce our first sector-specific community of practice focused on transitioning Ireland’s energy sector to a nature-positive future.

Since we started work on the Business For Biodiversity Ireland platform, we have identified the need to convene and facilitate meaningful conversations at sector level. We initially formed a multi-sector community of practice so we could explore the prevailing frameworks with a variety of businesses in the Irish context. The next phase of this work is the development of sector-specific communities of practice (SSCoP), starting by bringing together stakeholders in the energy sector.

Why energy?
The energy sector is a high-impact sector, has varied and significant impacts on the natural world and these impacts present risks to businesses and the economy. Equally, this sector has massive potential to activate positive impacts on biodiversity.

Understanding the energy sector’s impacts and dependencies on nature will help inform biodiversity strategies into the future. As well as direct operations, value chain impacts must be fully explored so that nature can be included in business decision-making.

The aim of these discussion- and action-focussed SSCoPs is to convene all actors and stakeholders within a sector and collectively forge a path forward to a nature positive future and will comprise private and semi-state organisations, experts, researchers and academics.

We encourage all partners within the SSCoPs to share their own experiences and knowledge freely, innovate new solutions and work together to help define best practice in an Irish context, taking positive steps towards systemic change within their sector.

Transitioning to a nature-positive mode of operating will be a gradual process that will be in a near constant state of evolution. The SSCoP will convene in-person, three times per year. At the end of each annual cycle, we will produce a set of guidelines for the sector. 

We believe that collective thinking and collective action will produce the most successful outcomes for people, nature and climate.

You can find out more about the commitment and apply here – Nature Positive Energy Community of Practice – https://businessforbiodiversity.ie/energy-sscop/

Nature Positive Roadmap – Step 2: Make a Commitment

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Business for Biodiversity Ireland offer our members an easy-to-follow Roadmap to Nature Positive – and the second step of Phase 1: Assess, after getting started, is to make a commitment to champion and support the objectives of the international Convention on Biological Diversity. Read more below…

Business For Biodiversity Ireland invites all our businesses to sign our Biodiversity Commitment. This comes after reviewing resources to expand your knowledge in the area of biodiversity loss and becoming familiar with the concept of Nature Positive, which is currently being defined and examined by the Nature Positive Initiative, a collective of the world’s largest nature organisations, business and finance coalitions.

Nature positive is a term that defines the actions and activities of a business that reduce negative impacts on nature across their operations and value chain, with concurrent business activities that redirect resources and financial investments towards the restoration and protection of nature.

Click to learn more about Nature Positive.

The Irish government declared a biodiversity emergency in 2019. According to the National Biodiversity Action Plan 2023-2030, all sectors of society including the private sector have a responsibility for nature’s conservation, to protect and restore ecosystems and the services they provide. Nature-positive business models are inherently more resilient to the impacts of climate change, create diverse employment opportunities and encourage innovative approaches to value-chain management.

The BFBI Biodiversity Commitment pledges to champion and support, by all means possible, the three urgent objectives of the international Convention on Biological Diversity: 

  • Conservation of biological diversity and ecosystem services 
  • Sustainable use of its components 
  • Fair and equitable sharing of the benefits that arise out of the utilisation of resources 

This includes a commitment to analyse and monitor your business activities to understand both your direct impacts on nature and your direct dependencies on nature and the associated risks, including defining biodiversity loss as a business risk, incorporating it into your company risk management portfolio.

It is also necessary to commit to understanding the impacts within your value chain and use this information to incorporate nature into decision-making. This includes encouraging your suppliers to make a similar commitment to strive for a nature positive future.

Read the full Biodiversity Commitment HERE.

Become a BFBI member HERE.

The Journey to Nature Positive: Getting Started

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Want to begin your journey to Nature Positive but not sure how to start? Business for Biodiversity Ireland Platform Lead Lucy Gaffney explains how our roadmap can help…

Over the last two years, Business for Biodiversity Ireland (BFBI) has been working with businesses of different sizes and across different sectors to understand what key challenges and barriers exist which might prevent them from starting to explore their nature-related risks.

We have found that there is a reasonable lack of understanding of the key issues around biodiversity loss and how those issues translate to business risk.

For some, like those in the primary industries of agriculture, extractives and energy, the risks are clear. But for others, the links to nature are intangible and blurry at best.

The Roadmap to Nature Positive

While developing our Roadmap to Nature Positive, which is aligned to the prevailing methodologies, broken down into easy-to-manage steps and translated into easy-to-understand language, we determined that the very first step on the journey should be focused on learning.

Most businesses need to fully appreciate what is at stake, not just from a operational perspective, but also from the perspective of the individual, families and communities. After all, business equals people.

To that end, the first step on our Roadmap to Nature Positive comprises a curated list of must-watch videos and a compilation of fifteen free ‘massive open online courses’ (MOOCs) delivered by higher education institutions like Rice University, University of Geneva and the University of Illinois through Coursera. We have also included courses provided by the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNEP) Environment Academy and Learning for Nature initiatives which cover topics like using spatial data for biodiversity and ecosystem restoration. You can choose the course(s) which best suit you and your business, and we’ll be adding more guidance on this soon.

This space is rapidly changing and more and more resources are becoming available to help people and businesses understand how our economies are underpinned by nature and biodiversity.

Join the Community

This must be a collective effort. No one business or sector can tackle the biodiversity crisis alone. If your business wants to mobilise for nature but you’re not clear on what to do or where to start, join the BFBI community and open up a world of opportunities for partnership, collaboration and learning. Your business can and must contribute to a nature positive world.

Register today and expand your knowledge!

Sign up: BFBI membership is free until April 2024

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The Business for Biodiversity Ireland platform is calling on Irish businesses of every size and sector to come together to accelerate action for nature by signing up to our members’ hub today.

Our Government-backed national platform has a new membership function – free until March 31st, 2024 – which includes an easy-to-follow roadmap which aims to demystify the multitude of biodiversity frameworks, guidance documents and tools for businesses facing new legislation on reporting impacts on nature.

With biodiversity – the variety of all living things – in sharp decline globally and nature restoration linked to the fight against climate change, EU legislation such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires businesses to report their impacts on the environment.

With increasing consumer demand and awareness of environmental issues also, more and more businesses are keen to transition their business model to Nature Positive, a mode of operation where business activities do not contribute to ecological harm but actively seek to support nature restoration. However, there is still much uncertainty around how to get started on this.

Business For Biodiversity Ireland offers members guidance documents, aligned to prevailing frameworks and emerging directives, along with short thematic videos, case studies, a calendar of informative events and a quarterly forum to exchange knowledge, share challenges and work together to progress their journey.

The platform has been jointly seed-funded by the National Parks & Wildlife Service/ Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Department of Agriculture, Food & the Marine, and has developed its network with feedback from pilot businesses in its Community of Practice, including An Post, Bank of Ireland, Bus Eireann, ESB, Glenveagh Homes and SAP Landscapes, with support from the National Biodiversity Data Centre and Business in the Community Ireland.

Speaking at BFBI’s recent Community of Practice workshop and launch event in Portlaoise’s Midlands Park Hotel, Bus Éireann’s Sustainability Senior Manager Emer Bambrick said:

“Our participation in the platform has greatly increased our understanding of Bus Éireann’s biodiversity-related risks and opportunities and helped to increase our alignment with global and national biodiversity goals and disclosure frameworks.”

At the launch of the membership call, BFBI platform lead Lucy Gaffney said: “Nature positive is not a destination, it is a mindset – a way of working that ensures economic activity no longer harms the natural world but actively invests in its stewardship, protection and restoration.”

Free membership of the Business For Biodiversity Ireland platform is offered for the first three months of 2024 – you can check out our membership terms and fee scale in our Terms of Reference and sign up HERE.

 

BFBI’s year in review: A look back at the highlights

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2023 was a big year for biodiversity and another busy year for Business For Biodiversity Ireland – a look back at some of the major moves transforming the landscape for nature at a global and local level…

EU Nature Restoration Law: After tense negotations and votes by MEPs, a landmark deal was finally reached on the Nature Restoration Law by the EU Parliament, European Commissions and EU Council. The law means that every EU country must have restoration measures in place covering 20% of EU land and sea areas by 2030. It will set legally binding targets and requirements for rewetting peatlands (30%, expanding to 40% by 2050) and for bringing ecosystems back into good condition across multiple habitats. In the build up, BFBI backed the Corporate Leaders Group & Business For Nature letter and online campaigns in support of the NRL, while platform lead Lucy Gaffney appeared on the Newstalk Breakfast Business show with Joe Lynam to discuss the importance of the law.

Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity Loss: Lucy Gaffney addressed Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly – the first such national citizens’ assembly anywhere in the world – which wrapped in January 2023 and in June, launched 150 recommendations that have the potential to dramatically transform Ireland’s relationship with the natural environment. The recommendations have since been reviewed and accepted by the government. The Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action recommends advancing a referendum on protecting biodiversity, that would see Ireland become the first in the EU to bestow nature with rights.

Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) – The directive took effect on January 3, 2023, with 18 months for EU countries to integrate it into law. The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) E4 standard addresses corporate sustainability relating to biodiversity and ecosystems. The aim is to help businesses to understand how they affect nature, positively and negatively, and how to interpret the results of corporate biodiversity action.

Science Based Targets for Nature: Over 80 global NGOs and organisations came together and released the first science-based targets for nature, enabling companies to start taking ambitious and measurable action on both climate and nature.

The High Seas Treaty: After decades of negotiations, countries finally agreed to a treaty to protect the world’s oceans outside national boundaries. It provides a framework for setting up marine protected areas, a crucial step to fulfil aims to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

Regulation on Deforestation-free products: The European Union is stopping imports of commodities and products linked to deforestation. Under a new regulation that entered into force in June 2023, importers of commodities such as soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa, coffee and rubber “must be able to prove that the products do not come from recently deforested land or have contributed to forest degradation”. This includes products such as chocolate and furniture made from those commodities.

Budget 2024 nature boost: The Irish government announced a new Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund with an unprecedented €3.15billion pledged for nature that will use windfall corporate tax profits to fund commitments to the environment up to 2030.

Bioeconomy Action Plan: Ireland’s first Bioeconomy Action Plan for 2023-2025 was jointly issued by the Department of Agriculture, Food & the Marine and the Department of the Environment, Climate & Communications. It includes 33 actions to accelerate support for the development of Ireland’s bioeconomy to bring sustainable scientific practices, technologies and bio-based innovation and solutions into use on farms and by bio-based industries.

COP28: At the global summit in the United Arab Emirates, world leaders finally agreed to launch the long-awaited fund for loss and damage caused by climate change – and the final text, agreed by almost 200 countries, for the first time includes a goal to move away from fossil fuels.

BFBI Community of Practice (CoP): We convened our community of practice in January 2023. This small, multi-sector CoP, comprising a mixture of Irish semi-state, private and academic organisations, met regularly throughout the year to share feedback on testing frameworks to assess their biodiversity impacts and the challenges of transitioning to a nature-positive mode of operation. We’ll be expanding this work with more sector specialisation in 2024, more details to come.

 

Man in suit with grey hair chats to blonde woman in beige coat in hallway with red carpet and beige walls

Minister of State Malcolm Noonan & BFBI’s Lucy Gaffney chat at SETU policy event

Business For Biodiversity Ireland key presentations & events of 2023

BFBI’s platform lead Lucy Gaffney spoke at several high-profile in-person conferences, as well as webinars and online discussions.

These included the business and biodiversity breakfast at Green Week, the CIEEM Irish Conference on Nature Positive, major annual conference Environment Ireland 2023 and she also addressed the Business Post’s ESG Summit.

Lucy also gave an overview of natural capital concepts for Chartered Accountants Ireland, joined a panel for Sustainability Week and took part in a Policy Forum for Ireland discussion on next steps for climate policy & action. She joined in a discussion on Addressing Biodiversity Loss with Sustainable Finance Solutions, alongside Minister for Heritage Malcolm Noonan, pictured with Lucy above, at an Irish Research Council-funded SouthEast Technical University Policy Workshop.

Other notable events included the SETAC Europe Conference, a biodiversity literacy Lunch & Learn talk for Irish broadcasters with the Broadcasting Sustainability Network, Climate Finance Week and a DCU Centre for Climate & Society panel discussion. You can watch back the stream, moderated by Dr Diarmuid Torney, DCU School of Law and Government and Co-Director of the Centre for Climate and Society, HERE.

Our team also attended the EU Business & Nature Summit in Milan in October – you can read their key takeaways HERE.

Sign up to our newsletter updates at the bottom of the BFBI homepage HERE.

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