In this blog series, Tandem Global CEO Margaret O’Gorman shares insights from her decades of experience working with businesses to advance nature-positive strategies. She’ll explore key trends, highlight innovative solutions, and offer perspectives on how companies can move from intention to action.

February 2025

Tandem Global is a new organization focused on combining business and nature for good. Rooted in the legacy of WHC and WEC, two global NGOs that played pivotal roles in the early days of corporate sustainability. Together they have witnessed sustainability evolve from initiative to strategic imperative, transitioning from sporadic efforts to become a fundamental aspect of corporate operations.

During a season of much disruption in this realm, it’s important to have perspective on the past and a clear value for the future iteration of corporate environmental sustainability. The timely arrival of Tandem Global offers both.

As companies recalibrate their efforts and pivot in response to headwinds, tailwinds and tornadoes, the direction for biodiversity loss, climate change, water quality and other planetary challenges remain stubbornly unchanged. For many in the profession, the pushback on corporate sustainability is demoralizing and depressing. For those with perspective it’s just further proof that we’re not so much following an elegant arc of progress, but a switchback road up a steep and rugged mountain.

At GreenBiz25 this year, many newly minted sustainability professionals gathered to learn, network and seek community during tough times. (Seasoned professionals gathered for the same reason.) A reflection repeated towards the end of the meeting was on how valuable this act of collegial collection was. This repeated sentiment highlighted that for many individuals, sustainability is now not only a career path, but also a calling.

GreenBiz25 also provided the opportunity for perspective in one of the inspiring main stage panels when long-time sustainability professional, Jill Dumain, a partner at Fractal CSOs, and Patagonia’s former Director of Environmental Strategy sat with Kathleen Talbot, Reformation’s CSO, a colleague relatively newer to the effort. Jill reminded us of how far we’ve come as she described the effort to source organic cotton in a time when faxes were the main mode of communication and phone calls were prohibitively expensive. She told stories of physically tracing the supply chain and creating a product that we now know as organic cotton which was all but nonexistent back when Patagonia was embarking on its sustainability journey. She told how Walmart’s embrace of the same material was a tipping point in her understanding that sustainability could move the needle beyond a niche apparel company to a behemoth retailer. The distance between the first fax and Walmart’s conversion was many years. This story, one of perspectives linking past and present was pitch perfect for the occasion and reminds us how far we’ve come.

As Tandem Global launches it will carry decades of learning, continuing its predecessors’ focus on impact. Here are some of the things we’re thinking about as we address the present, reflect on the past, and gear up for the future:

Normalize the evolution of commitments.

A company that makes a sustainability commitment in 2020 towards a 2025 goal will have 5 years more data and information at the end of the goal period than it had at the beginning. If this additional information does not cause a change in commitments, the goal was flawed to begin with. We need to normalize the evolution of corporate climate and nature commitments and be at peace with the fact that circumstances, data, science and policy are all forces that act on corporate goals. There is an embedded reflex in our community to condemn a company for changing its commitments

Accept storytelling.

Data does not tell the whole story. Over-weaponization of greenwashing has resulted in a dismissal of storytelling as an effect sustainability communication tool for stakeholders. If the finance folk want excel spreadsheets and complicated formulae, provide them. However, if stakeholders want stories of exceptional efforts and inspirational results, companies should provide those as well. We who seek to judge should be bright enough to know the difference between a sum and a story.

Understand company culture.

The corporate world is not built of beige colored blocks of brutalist concrete that can be viewed as a single entity from afar. It is more like a pointillist painting where each dot contributes to the whole picture, whilst being unique. Many of the tools and roadmaps being marketed to companies today to serve their sustainability needs seem to be offering a ‘one size fits all’ approach. A legacy flowing through Tandem Global’s DNA is understanding corporate culture and meeting companies where they are.

Design implementation into strategies.

The distance between the C-suite and the site of operation is vast in both real and metaphorical terms, yet many strategies are developed seemingly without this understanding. What we affectionately call the ‘Clay Layer’ – nothing gets through it – is the internal strata of functions, departments, and responsibilities that, if not acknowledged, can derail the most beautifully crafted sustainability strategies for nature, water, climate or social impact. Building implementation approaches by understanding people, policies, processes and operations is the only way strategies become actions. A recent issue of Amplify that I guest edited alongside my colleague, Frank Werner, addressed this issue with some powerful examples of pushing through the clay layer.

Integrate for impact.

One of the biggest legacy items coming from WHC and WEC to Tandem Global is the importance of integrating strategies for better impact in terms of environment and society. The S of ESG sometimes seems to be an afterthought but integrating a human dimension into nature, water and climate strategies can reap benefits for a company’s employee engagement, community relations, social license to operate and risk reduction strategies. Since its launch in 2016, WHC’s singular certification program has weighted scoring for societal efforts alongside environmental ones. It has developed and delivered methodologies to provide impact assessments through biodiversity and societal lenses and, it has convened companies across their fence lines for meaningful community engagement. Much of WEC’s focus has been geared towards the beginning of the supply chain, providing capacity building for SMSEs in central and south America to develop resilience in small holder agriculture and women-owned businesses. These social efforts integrate seamlessly with environmental work to double impact and leverage resources. As sustainability budgets tighten, integrating for impact will no longer be an exceptional approach but an expected approach.

Today, when the proven principles of corporate sustainability are being challenged, when regulatory advances are being weakened, when the environmental and societal problems we seek to solve persist and grow, many may fall into despair. But rather than lose hope, we must use our perspective to learn from where we’ve been, and our passion to leverage that learning to build the future we want to reach. The switchback road we’re on seems to have taken a 180 degree turn but it is still, ever so slightly, moving us up the hill.

As the only international NGO focused exclusively on enabling private sector action for nature, WHC has convened professionals working at the intersection of business and nature since 1990. This post is a transcript of WHC President Margaret O’Gorman’s 2024 State of Corporate Conservation speech, presented in New Orleans at the 2024 WHC Conservation Conference on June 4, 2024.

Good afternoon, everyone. It’s great to see you all here — to see returning friends and colleagues as well as new faces, It’s great to see everyone gathered here in New Orleans to celebrate and congregate for conservation, biodiversity, wildlife, nature.

I’d like to start today’s address with an observation by my grandmother who, as chance would have it, was also named Margaret. My grandmother lived to be 101 years old. At some stage in the last few years of her life, I had the opportunity to ask her what, over her long lifetime on earth, was the biggest change she had experienced.

She could have responded politically by pointing out that at the age of 37, she witnessed her country emerge from centuries of colonial oppression to become a republic. She could have responded practically by talking about how the telephone arrived in her home in the 1960s when she was married and bringing up her family — her phone number was 61 — or she could have responded flippantly and mentioned women wearing trousers, something she never did once in her life.

But instead, she responded philosophically saying that the biggest change she had seen in her long and full life was in the decreasing availability of time. She said over her life, people seemed to have a lot more things but a lot less time. In her world, in her experience, time had become a scarce commodity. In the early to mid-20th century, everyone visited. They stopped to chat, drink tea, play cards, catch up. By the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, people now just popped in to check in, saying “No, thanks” on the tea,” explaining that they just didn’t have time. My grandmother wondered, quite rightly, where had the time disappeared to, and how it was being spent differently to when she was younger.

I’ve had occasion to reflect on her observation over the years, and when I find myself rushing from task to task, I remind myself of what she said. And recently, when I think about nature and the work we do, I remind myself of not so much how much time there was when my grandmother was a young person, but also how much more nature there was when she was a young person. And I think about how the two are intrinsically linked — time and loss and recovery of nature.

On the one hand, time is our friend. Time makes our outcomes better: Well-designed conservation programs deliver greater impacts over time. Time makes our relationships stronger: When we work with the same people and the same companies for decades, we develop deep and trusting relationships. Time helps us get smarter: We acquire more knowledge and experiences, which in turn helps us design better programs and experience better impacts.

On the other hand, time is our enemy. Nature continues to decline over time — the goal to create a nature-positive world by 2030 leaves us with only 5 ½ years left to reverse decades of nature going in the wrong direction.

It’s not going to be easy to turn the tide for nature, but WHC’s community of corporate conservationists can show how it can be done, one program after another. Our 35+ years of experience has created an ecosystem of action and impact that we should be proud of.

In future years, we hope to expand this ecosystem of action and impact as we move forward with the organizational change, that some of you may know about — it’s an organizational combination, a merger, that we are currently undergoing with the World Environment Center. In a community where shiny new nature-based and sustainability-focused non-profits appear in numbers that rival cicadas during a periodic emergence, the combination of WHC and World Environment Center will see two non-profits with a collective 80 years of experience coming together to consolidate operations, pool respective strengths, leverage long legacies of success to deliver best-in-class thought leadership, technical and strategic support, education and capacity building to support company’s ambitions for nature, water, climate and social impact. We’re bringing our resources together to advance the change we need.

We’re very excited about this combination and look forward to creating an international business-focused NGO that draws on a deep pool of past experiences to create a cascade of future-focused efforts to support the entire value chain. The combination will not change anything at the program level – we will still insist that Every Act of Conservation Matters™, and we will still stand ready to support and recognize your nature-based efforts whether through technical assistance for operations or strategic planning for corporate efforts.

As we reflect on the time that WHC and WEC have been around — 35+ for WHC and 40+ for WEC — we can also reflect on those of our members that have been engaged with us all along. Michelle Oxlade from Covia pointed out to us last year that they have been members since 1989 — two years after our founding — with 21 programs certified with us starting in 1995. They have been members for 35 years, as have Vulcan Materials and WM. Members with slightly longer tenure, i.e. since the very beginning of WHC, include ExxonMobil, BP and DuPont, while in the 30 – 35 year range we have PPG, DTE, Bayer, Southern Nuclear and IBM.

These members have stayed with us through corporate upheavals, economic ups and downs and changes internally to staff, ambition and engagement with biodiversity. Each one works with us in different ways, each has a different approach to creating uplift for nature, but each has remained steadfast and consistent in maintaining some engagement with biodiversity for 30 years or more.

And consistency is what it is all about. It’s only through consistent and adaptive management that we can deliver impact for nature. A conservation program in its first year will have some positive impact on biodiversity, whether attracting pollinators to a newly native garden, allowing a meadow to self-seed, setting aside land in permanent protection or even putting in place policies to stop poaching. All have an initial and important impact, but it’s in the subsequent years with adaptive management that we can return better and better results: more plants, more pollinators, more habitats on protected lands, more species not being poached. Over time, conservation results, like interest, compound. When we look across WHC’s portfolio of certified programs from the two programs first certified in 1990 and still actively managed and certified today to 2024’s cohort of 25 newly certified programs — when we look across all 625 programs worldwide, we find that on average, program scores increase the longer a program has been certified, showing that time returns better outcomes.

Better outcomes are critically necessary because acting on the biodiversity crisis with projects that restore habitats and species, reclaim degraded land for nature and transform highly managed lands from biodiversity deserts to oases of life and color is what we need to do to reverse the decades of loss and move towards the nature-positive future we all want and, to be frank, we all need.

One of the best things about this conference is that we get to celebrate, showcase and learn about the programs that are contributing to turning the tide on biodiversity loss. We get to hear about and be inspired by newly certified programs, recently renewed certifications and from efforts by our partners and friends.

Every year we receive applications adopting interesting approaches, and this year we’ve noticed that technology is playing a bigger role than ever before in program management and monitoring. OPG’s Western Waste Management Facility program on Lake Huron is using pre-programmed flight patterns for their unmanned aerial vehicles — drones — to monitor the invasive phragmites on-site and then using the data to manage the phragmites in a systemic way, while Anglo American is using heat mapping to direct its irrigation of its newly certified reforestation program in Peru.

Technology to support efforts to enhance, restore, monitor and measure biodiversity is a growing field — called NatureTech. A report released last year from Nature4Climate showed that Venture Capital investments in NatureTech has increased by 130% between 2020 and 2022, and in the last five years, accumulated VC investments in nature tech startups totaled $7.5 billion. This amount is still a fraction of what’s known as ClimateTech and other technology subgenres, but that it is now considered an investment category in its own right suggests a maturing market, which in turn suggests that there is a robust customer base for these types of innovations.

But, beyond technology, good old-fashioned ecological work on ecosystems remains key, and this year we reviewed some interesting restoration programs on of significant ecosystems and species. Anglo American’s newly certified program this year is in the high mountain semi-arid region of Peru. This region is home to forests dominated by Polylepis species, which have been listed by IUCN as threatened. Polylepis forests are mainly found on steep and less accessible valley slopes and have increasingly suffered from habitat loss and fragmentation. It is estimated that in Peru, Polylepis forests cover only 4% of their original distribution. Anglo American has committed to voluntarily protecting and restoring a 100-hectare Polylepis forest located within its operational boundary at Alto Asana. To achieve this, they’ve established a native plant nursery to supply the reforestation effort.

On the other side of the world, long term partner/member Freeport McMoRan’s PTFI program continues to deliver biodiversity benefit intertwined with social impact but this year, our Cert team and reviewers were struck by an effort that has scientific significance as well as ecological significance, which is the research project on the singing dog population on Papua. From Freeport’s Anne George and her colleague Kukuh Kusuma, we learned that the Papua singing dog, also known as the highland wild dog, is the rarest and most ancient canid in the world. Thought to have been extinct in the wild, they were only identified as recently as 2020, and the research team is trying to gain a greater understanding of the population of wild dogs found in the Grasberg mining area — studying the population with camera traps and radio collars, tissue collection, etc. and engaging and educating the community about the local population. One theory for their recent re-sighting is that the reclamation work at the mine that expanded the dogs’ habitat, with over 470 hectares of connectivity that allow for movement, provide shelter, food and breeding areas.

The singing dogs have a strong relationship with the indigenous people in the region who hold traditional knowledge about the species, its needs and its habitats. Some tribes believe the dog is their ancestor. Such knowledge is being integrated into the study, which is a trend we are seeing across conservation as more and more, indigenous and local knowledge is being given consideration and integrated into practice. And this knowledge is not only with tribes in remote regions like Grasberg — there is much such indigenous and local knowledge here in the U.S. if we take the time to find it.

I was recently at a meeting in Monterey California with the USGS, and members of the Rumsen Ohlone tribe talked about the importance of specific reeds to traditional basket making which had vanished from practice by the tribe. They spoke eloquently of reverse engineering from old baskets to identify the sedge used in the basketry and then finding the reed beds where they could collect the sedge. This is a small example of a connection between a community and nature centered on local and traditional knowledge.

Another interesting intersection between community and nature was seen in an application from Oxy’s Glenn Springs Holding company, where they described the decision to transfer management of some areas of the Copper Basin restoration project in Ducktown, Tennessee, to the Ducktown Basin Museum, a community not-for profit. The museum will manage the site and install public hiking and interpretive trails. The museum has pledged to continue to partner with Glenn Springs Holding to control invasive species along the trails for access, aesthetics, visibility and wildlife habitat in support of this program’s Gold certification.

I know that our work is not all “singing dogs,” museum partnerships or NatureTech. Not every program can be unique or innovative — our mantra “every act of conservation matters” still guides us all, and this inclusive approach results in real impact on the ground as can be seen through our certification numbers this year. Because of you, the people in this room, WHC has currently certified 623 programs containing over 1,600 projects across 18 countries. This past year we saw 274 successful program applications including 25 brand new applications. And, just as an FYI, Vulcan has already submitted applications for the 2024 deadline, and as Doreen Tadde, who many of you know, said, “This is the type of gungho-ness we like to see.” Thank you, Vulcan, for our making our Cert team’s life a little easier!

This year, we have recognized our second program on distillery lands with a new certification for Bacardi-Martini at the Bombay Sapphire Distillery in the U.K. CalPortland has joined our building materials colleagues with two brand new certifications in California — we hope there are more to come — and Cemex continues to grow its number of certified programs to 35 with the addition of three new sites this year, two in Mexico and one in the Dominican Republic that received Silver level certification with only two projects working with a local partner to restore and manage a 741-acre wetland complex called Laguna de Los Cangrejos.

Our top three companies in terms of numbers of certified programs are WM with 164 certified programs with Bucks County Land Fill, its longest continually certified program since 2001 and currently certified Gold, Constellation has 68 certified programs and Cemex coming close behind with 66 certified programs. Now, it’s not the number of programs that’s most important — it’s the quality of those programs that’s key. At the heart of every application, the question we ask is simple: Is your program delivering uplift for nature because it is designed with an appropriate conservation objective in mind and implemented with the best practices to deliver on the goal?

And because we like to incentivize performance, we also ask: Is your program designed to deliver exceptional impact for nature? Two first-year certified programs this year were designed and implemented to deliver exceptional impact. At Johnson and Johnson, Warsaw Indiana, the team worked with WHC technical staff to find out where their existing program that had been on the ground for a while could improve, and thanks to the gap analysis we delivered — and the fact that the team followed our advice — the program is now newly certified Gold and is up for a pollinator award this year.

Another newly certified program that achieved gold is a place I always thought had potential for nature. When I lived in New Jersey, I would find myself often on Route 1 in the Princeton area and passing this heavily manicured office park called Carnegie Center. Every time I passed it, I thought about its potential. About the hundreds of acres of mown grass and about how much that land could deliver for nature if it was managed with imagination and a focus on biodiversity instead of for a look that I like to call corporate pastoralism, which we’ve all come to expect in such office park. So, all these years later, I was thrilled to find the Carnegie Center on the list of newly certified programs.

Its appearance on the list of newly certified programs was not a result of my wishful thinking, but the result of George Cella, the property manager who saw the potential for nature, and Kennedy Jenks, tenants at Carnegie Center, who advised and supported his efforts. It’s now certified Gold and shows that the prevailing narrative of what corporate landscapes should look like is not an eternal one. Imagine the impact if every office park had a George Cella and engaged tenants!

The Carnegie Center’s application, operating in a landscaped habitat, is the most common project types submitted as part of an application this past year. Grasslands habitat comes in close second. In species projects, avian projects are the most commonly submitted, giving credence to the idea of birds as both a gateway species to greater engagement with nature and a keystone species whose presence can indicate health of an ecosystem. The high number of avian projects also speaks to the fact that almost every habitat type we work with can support bird species, both common and rare and that birds, by their very mobile nature are definitely “build it and they will come” types.

Another “build it and they will come” approach that we are seeing a great interest in is in microforests — these lovely little forests, sometimes the size of a tennis court, are perfect for the industrial lands we work with and are a great way to get employee and community engagement for a short, impactful period of time. These forests are small, but because of the mixture of plants and the density with which they are planted, they provide faster ROI in terms of growing and reaching maturity to support other species. Studies have shown that diversity of plant species supports greater diversities of wildlife and that dense plantings can crowd out invasives more effectively than not. These microforests work well in places that are not wilderness areas, protected areas or key biodiversity areas, work well with the lands available to us and work well in places with people and industry and impact. They work well because they focus not just on rare species but also on keeping common species common for all.

Whether it’s the Carnegie Center’s efforts, the microforests at WM’s Harlem River Yard Transfer Station, the meadows at Kinder Morgan’s Elizabeth River terminal, the bat hibernacula at CRH’s Montpelier quarry reclamation site, the programs we review and certify every year are redefining how a workplace can exist in harmony with nature. Each program eats away at a belief that nature’s place is elsewhere.

Of course, at the heart of this believe and in an echo of our expectation of corporate pastoralism, is our addiction to lawns — these monocultures support little to no life and require enormous amounts of effort and inputs to maintain. Some estimates in the United States suggest that lawns cover 10 to 16 million hectares, which is more than the combined land used to grow barley, cotton and rice. Imagine taking 50% of these hectares and converting to habitats that can deliver benefit for biodiversity. Imagine the money we would save from not having to maintain in such an intensive way, the water we would save from not having to irrigate in dry climates, the energy we would personally save from fewer mowers and other power tools and the time we would save from not having weekends centered around lawn maintenance. And finally, imagine the biodiversity we could cause to blossom by designing our spaces for nature.

It’s a novel idea to think about a 50% reduction in lawn across our landscapes, but it is possible. And to be bold, a goal of 85% reduction could be adopted — Toyota North America has done that. For the third year in a row, Toyota has worked with us to identify opportunities to convert manicured lawns at its manufacturing centers across North America to meet a goal in its environmental action plan to convert 85% of manicured areas to more natural habitat for native wildlife. If we all adopted Toyota’s lofty goal, that could be 13 million more hectares managed for biodiversity. Can you commit today to reducing lawn cover at home or at your place of work by 85% — maybe start with 50% over this next year?

Now, I’m no expert but on exactly how to achieve this goal but lucky for you, we have plenty of people attending conference giving panel presentations and available over the course of the next two days to help you. Some in the audience will remember Doug Tallamy, who gave a wonderful keynote at our conference a few years ago. He has returned to us this year to talk about his campaign to bring nature back to backyards. It’s called Homegrown National Park, and he will be joined by Shubber Ali, whose Garden for Wildlife platform seeks to make it easier to bring nature to backyards and Damon Abdi from Louisiana State University. They’re all in a panel about the benefits of native plants and growing healthy places for people to be facilitated by our own Savanna Delise.

Also focused on building healthy futures, was our keynote speaker from Thrive New Orleans, Chuck Morse this morning — I hope you enjoyed his informative talk advancing new systems for economic opportunity, climate resiliency, and community stability across the city. It’s tough to follow a speaker who is also a pastor. And we’ve another great keynote speaker tomorrow. If there are any weather nerds in the audience, and who is not at some level, a weather nerd, make sure you check out our speaker tomorrow. He will be a real treat. Matthew Cappucci is an award-winning meteorologist who is the cheerful voice of the Capital Weather Gang that delivers forecasts in Washington metro region. Matthew is a stormchaser who can be seen all over the U.S. in his work for MyRadar, and most recently, was all across the great plains collecting giant hail and looking for super cells. So, however many hurricanes you have tonight, make sure you turn up tomorrow to learn about tornadoes. Matthew is a passionate advocate for taking the time to stop and look up in this world. This is the type of guy my grandmother would appreciate — someone who takes the time to pause and look around while also being very busy and productive.

Over the next two days, we’re taking the time to pause, to recognize and reflect on the work that we have all done — over the next two days, you will have the opportunity to learn from your peers and from experts in the world of business and nature in a diverse selection of sessions curated expertly by our conference team from what was, this year, a record number of submissions. You can learn about native plants or nature tech. You can sit in a session about reclamation or nature-based solutions on operations lands. You can learn from experts about engaging employees in conservation action. Sessions about effective communications, measuring biodiversity, nature-positive journeys and urban forestry are all on tap today and tomorrow, including a session about conservation happening here in New Orleans and the region.

When we started to move our conference to different locations after the pandemic, we realized that we have a great opportunity to showcase local conservation efforts, and tomorrow, we are so excited and pleased to showcase four stories from New Orleans and Louisiana. And to add to the local flavor, with its return for the third year running, our Makers’ Pavilion makes space for local independent artists and artisans representing the best of the Big Easy. I know I always find some really great gifts and pieces at our Makers’ Pavilion, and I am sure you will too. Our exhibitors are here to provide you with expert advice and guidance on the services they offer, so please make sure to stop by and engage.

And, of course, our time together will also be enlivened by our awards program. This year we are presenting 23 project awards, the three big awards — for Employee Engagement, Corporate Conservation Leadership and Gold Program of the Year, and as well as our Ibis Award that recognizes programs that have overcome significant challenges. And yes, our Spirit Award is back for the team whose creativity and focus on fun impresses the judges at our dinner on Wednesday night. Remember to bring your team spirit.

This time of year, as we prepare for and attend conference, is WHC’s time to reflect on our work over the last 12 months — work we have done for our members but most importantly, work we have done with our members. In the past 12 months, we have published four white papers, which have used your programs as case studies to illustrate topics as diverse as nature-based solutions for pollution prevention, the nature-positive journey, one on avian conservation and one on reptile and amphibian conservation projects. We couldn’t write these white papers without your work, so thank you for having great programs that we can share across our community and beyond.

Your work has also informed our webinar series — this past 12 months, we hosted 11 webinars, reaching over 2,000 people who either viewed live or watched the recording afterwards. The webinars have been getting very creative recently. We welcomed Josh Hydeman, an award-winning conservation photographer, to talk to us about photographing bats; WHC staff took to their kitchens to present tasty menus made with invasive species; and, following the success of our bug hotel challenge, we launched a new building challenge called Create the Ideal Avian Abode, which is open for submissions through November 1 of this year. These webinars and all others are all available for anyone to see on our website.

These webinars are so important because they serve to inspire, and webinars like the photography one reminds us in a very visual way, why we are doing what we are doing, reminding us that all of our efforts, whether in educating, certifying or implementing, are in the service of a greater goal – to help recover what we have lost. Our goal is, in some ways, to help turn back time.

And all evidence points to the fact that we need to do it as a matter of urgency. The global conservation NGO, the World Wildlife Fund publishes the Living Planet Index. This report shows the annual rate of change in animal population size across the globe. It’s published every two years and is an important record, an important document of our declining world. The most recent index finds that that globally, monitored populations of birds, mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians have declined in abundance by 69% on average between 1970 and 2016, and in that global average is hidden the fact that in some regions of the world like Latin America and the Caribbean, species have declined in abundance by close to 90% or more.

A report by the American Bird Conservancy has found 2.9 billion fewer birds in our skies than there were in 1970. This study brought together 48 years of data from multiple sources like the backyard bird count and the Christmas Day bird count — all events that WHC members participate in and submit data to — but 2.9 billion birds lost is a number that is very difficult to fathom. For a single species, it’s no easier to understand the numbers — the ABC’s report tells us that the dark-eyed junco, a little sparrow that lives across the temperate regions of the USA and Canada, has lost an incredible 175 million individuals from its population, while its cousin the white-throated sparrow has lost 93 million.

I talk a lot about this loss of species, the loss of color and the loss of sound from our environment — and I talk about the loss of habitat. I recently read an interesting observation that we shouldn’t call it habitat loss. The author Kate Bradbur, writing in The Guardian newspaper about the destruction of an entire family of hedgehogs in favor of a parking lot, says, “We cry habitat loss, but it’s theft really — no species is so careless as to lose their homes.” Sometimes, I hesitate to talk about these losses or thefts because it makes me sad, and it should make us all sad. I learned the term to describe this feeling of sadness at the loss of nature recently — solastalgia.

Solastalgia is sadness caused by negative environmental change that has happened — the loss of nature, the degradation of ecosystems, etc. It’s kin to a term you may also know: ecoanxiety, which is focused on future loss and degradation. But solastalgia is all about what we once had and what we no longer have, and the sadness that is in the distance between the two situations.

This distance can’t be measured in feet, inches or miles. It can only be measured in time. As Tennessee Williams, the great dramatist who once lived and wrote in New Orleans, said, “Time is the longest distance between two places.” And solastalgia is the way we mark that time and distance.

If we think about 69% of biodiversity disappearing since the 1970s, it means that people who were born in the 21st century are experiencing an entirely different world, a nature-poor world, and they may not know what they are missing . They won’t feel solastalgia the way those of us born in the mid to late 20th century do. Someone who has never experienced nature richness can only mourn its loss in the abstract. This could be a good thing in terms of emotional health and well-being, but the further we travel from a nature-rich past, and the lower the likelihood of solastalgia, the harder it will become to bridge the distance back. In this instance, time is not our friend.

The generations that were born and lived in nature-rich times must convince the generations that were born under nature-poor circumstances that they should seek a future from the past, to a time when there will be 175 million more dark-eyed juncos, 93 million more white-throated sparrows, and achieve other nature goals like 20,000 more right whales, four million more acres of restored forests and over 1/2 million square miles of lands protected or managed for nature, in the USA alone.

We need to build a bridge across time with conservation action. We need to make sure that the generations that are taking up the challenge to return nature to its past vibrancy can see to the other side of the bridge and what is possible. We build this bridge through the work we do, the plans we hatch, the programs we recognize and the stories we share, from the successes and failures we encounter.

Building this bridge between what was and what will be may seem like a mammoth task — in fact, it is a mammoth task. But we build the bridge one conservation action at a time, one project, one program, one strategy, one microforest, one pollinator garden. This approach of breaking down mammoth tasks into single actions was encapsulated beautifully in a book called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. The author tells the story of her kid brother, in tears of frustration sitting at their kitchen table with an unstarted assignment to write an essay in the birds of America due the next day. He had a blank page, a word count due and a massive task ahead. Seeing his mounting panic, his father calmed him saying, “Bird by bird. Just do it bird by bird.” That’s how we build our bridge to a nature-rich future — bird by bird, forest by forest, wetland by wetland.

And the great thing about this approach is that — breaking news — conservation action works. In a recent paper published in the journal Science, a group of authors set out to better understand the outcomes of conservation actions and whether such actions actually contribute to the halt and reversal of biodiversity loss. In a global meta-analysis of conservation projects, they found that in 75% of cases, conservation improved the state of biodiversity or slowed declines. The study found that interventions targeted at species and ecosystems, such as invasive species control, habitat loss reduction and restoration and protected areas management are highly effective. Some may say that Captain Obvious wrote that paper, but it can be good to get science on our side when we’re pressing the cause of conservation action. This is the sort of research results that we love to read because it validates our efforts and makes us feel part of a crew whose individual efforts make a collective impact.

This approach of working together in many different ways is, in my opinion, what makes WHC and its membership unique. And we embrace a diversity of approaches, we acknowledge that every act matters and we create a nature connection from the corporate office to the site of operations.

While WHC has deep roots at operations, we are increasingly working with corporate and group offices. Over the past year, we have seen a continued increase in interest in the new frameworks for reporting and disclosing nature impacts. We have framed this work as a nature journey for companies and have helped companies at different points of their journeys. Some companies like Johnson & Johnson do their own analysis as to their engagement with the frameworks and came to us for validation, while others like Chemours seek our support up front to assess what they needed to do to get ready to align and report. There are many prescriptions out there about how to develop and implement a nature strategy but, in our experience, over three-plus decades, we know that each company’s journey is different.

We found that especially to be true when we hosted a group of corporate-level nature and nature-adjacent professionals at our Business and Nature Summit last November. This summit was designed to provide those building a nature strategy with a primer on the ever-changing world of nature-related frameworks like TNFD, SBTN, Nature 100 and GRI and an opportunity to exchange thoughts on the challenges they face moving this work up and down the corporate hierarchy. The conversation was rich and focused a lot on connecting site-based work to corporate needs, on wrapping strategies around actions that were already happening and on making sure that the operations remained supported and engaged in action.

This year, we hope to convene some of these same people again, not at our Business and Nature Summit but at the global meeting for biodiversity that is happening in Cali, Colombia, in October. This meeting, COP16, is the bi-annual gathering of countries coming together this year, and it’s a good time to remind the decision makers that companies have a role to play in reaching the targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework. So, WHC will be bringing a delegation of members to Cali to showcase their work in different events across the meeting. One of our showcase opportunities will be in work our Rob Campbell is doing on a multi-national publication about positive incentives for biodiversity restoration using case studies from WHC members to show that action is possible.

With our members this year, we have spurred a lot of meaningful action — over the course of the past year, WHC Consulting has visited 235 corporate locations to support work to develop, maintain or grow a corporate conservation program. In addition, the consulting team worked in-depth with 64 companies to deliver support in the form of conservation assessments, custom conservation trainings, tree plantings, writing guides and toolkits for specific site use, creating habitat and species guidance documents, delivering biodiversity management plans and supporting company-wide nature-related signature initiatives.

This year, Shell USA and Penske supported us to develop a biodiversity guide which will be distributed to Indy race venues across the country. This is a great example of promoting nature in non-traditional places. Toyota asked us to develop planting lists for nature playgrounds at several of their on-site childcare centers this year. These lists include sensory-friendly native plants — ones that feel interesting, sound interesting and look interesting. This is a great example of thinking outside the traditional landscaping box and deploying nature in play.

Our Social Impacts team also worked on deploying nature in play by installing a natural playground in southeastern Michigan this year while also overseeing the planting of 120 trees in industrial landscapes in Michigan, Arizona and Texas and initiating a new program funded by the EPA to deploy 84 air quality sensors in highly impacted communities in Michigan and Illinois. Working in Port Arthur Texas with Energy Transfer, the Social Impact team discovered yet another benefit of urban forestry — to mitigate the increased lightning strikes caused by the urban heat island effect.

Urban heat islands, as Chuck Morse mentioned, exist where cities experience temperatures up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the surrounding countryside. This is caused by the absence of natural surfaces like trees and soils that can absorb the heat. Urban heat islands seriously compromise human health. One of the effects of urban heat islands is increased lightning strikes due to increased temperature contrasts. Urban forestry contributed to lowering temperatures in urban heat islands which can in turn reduce lightning strikes, so it’s not a stretch to say that trees protect us from lightning — the benefits of urban forests just keep stacking up.

We’re always learning new things at WHC, and I hope you learn new things over the next couple of days. But as you do, I want you think about what side of the bridge you are on? If you were born before 1970, and there are a few of us here who were, your job is to acknowledge and communicate that you came into a nature-rich world and to use your resources, your wisdom and your power — also any super powers you may have — to create the enabling conditions for those in the room who were not born into an environment of rich and abundant nature to build back so that those who are yet to be born get to experience the juncos, the sparrows, the forests and lakes in ways that have almost been forgotten.

Together we’ll take the time, and we’ll do it bird by bird. We’ll convert our lawns to meadows, plant forests to alleviate lightning, research singing dogs, develop corporate nature strategies and engage and educate those around us in the effort. We’ll start today. Because, as the ever-quotable Ben Franklin said, “You may delay, but time will not.”

Thank you.

One of WHC’s authentic strengths as an organization is our ability to deploy almost four decades of experience working at the intersection of business and nature to understand the real-world challenges and options for supporting companies on their nature-positive journeys. We’ve always had a bias for action, and we’ve always been pragmatic, focused on what’s possible over what’s ideal.  

In the past year, WHC has deployed this pragmatism to help a variety of companies cut through the noise of the corporate nature landscape where advice is abundant, but clarity — and sometimes honesty — is in short supply. Feedback from WHC’s membership has shown that confusion reigns when it comes to companies determining the facts from the sales fiction. 

Over the past year of working with our members and others, four interesting themes have emerged that continue to inform WHC’s efforts in 2024 and beyond: 

Benchmarking Is a Clarifying Agent 

In 2023, WHC carried out biodiversity benchmarking exercises for several companies in the extractive, manufacturing and energy sectors. The consulting team assessed companies’ published actions, commitments, disclosures and reporting against a group of peer companies and placed the results on a spectrum from laggard to leader.   

We found that: 

• There is a clear difference between the companies that do and the companies that tell, and that difference can leave a company focused on action over reporting at a disadvantage against its peers. 
• The current landscape of reports, assessments and indices doesn’t provide good spaces to capture the reality on the ground — and if it does, these expectations don’t take context into account. As an example: A company gets dinged for not having a deforestation policy even if geospatial analysis of its operations shows no proximity to core forests. A similar company in the same sector will rate higher for having the policy, even if it is moot. 

Company culture dictates whether ‘doing’ or ‘telling’ dominates sustainability work, and whether sustainability offices draw staff from communications or engineering disciplines likewise drives either a narrative or action bias.  

Framework Readiness Is Essential 

The author Ann Lamott explained the title of her book Bird by Bird with an anecdote about her brother who, when he was 10 years old, had left to the last minute a school report he needed to write on birds. As he sat tearfully at the table with his reference books, notebooks and pencils spread out in front of him, panicked by the mammoth task ahead, his father sat beside him and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”  

Many sustainability professionals will empathize with the situation of a blank sheet of paper and a mammoth task ahead.  

We found that: 

• A “bird-by-bird” approach works just as well for engaging in new frameworks, like the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and Science Based Tagrets Network (SBTN), as it does for school reports. While this finding sounds like an obvious one, we learned that companies struggle with where and how to start. The exhortation “just start somewhere” does not really help. 
• Readiness assessments are key to supporting progress, as they allow companies to understand specific requirements and realize that much of the information is available internally through already collected data and externally through existing tools and guidances. 

The consulting team at WHC developed a TNFD readiness assessment tool that we deployed with several companies at different points of their nature-positive journeys. In each case, the assessment helped the company arrive at a starting point that made sense for its operations.  

Saying No Can Be a Superpower 

We heard from many companies across the year about the firehose of content from consultants urging them to adopt a suite of frameworks or align with certain initiatives. This sends confusing and overwhelming messages to nascent nature offices and, in some cases, provides inaccurate and misleading messages that reek of bandwagon-jumping. 

We found that: 

• Companies are not yet resourced adequately to respond to the flow of information or to sort fact from fiction, which can lead to a stasis if the time needed to assess the veracity of messages is not freely available. 
• Attention to corporate culture and operational context are often missing from the “one-size-fits-all” presentations, which renders these approaches especially ineffective and wasteful of sustainability officers’ time.  

When WHC offered a service to companies to help them say no, it was met with much enthusiasm. Saying no is not about refusing to act for nature — it’s about directing the available energy to act in the right direction. Saying no is about understanding the difference between what must be done, what should be done and what could be done, as well as understanding what is unnecessary, ineffective or diversionary.  

The Lack of Data Is Not the Problem 

Let’s first agree that data is not needed to act for nature. Metrics are not a prerequisite to restoring and recovering ecosystems and the planet’s rich biodiversity. Indicators won’t make us nature positive by 2030. But companies need data to understand impact, ensure commitments are credible and report progress. 

We found that: 

• A conversation needs to occur between environmental, social and governance (ESG) and environmental health and safety (EHS) offices. EHS professionals have been capturing and collecting data on nature-related topics for as long as such regulations have been in place, but they are leery about sharing this data for reasons outside of compliance. Working with an energy company last year, WHC consultants found a complete lack of trust between sustainability and compliance offices, which created difficulties in collecting data for ESG purposes.  

EHS professionals worry about misuse of data that could lead to criticisms and accusations of greenwashing. Sustainability offices can allay these fears by opening conversations with their colleagues, including them in discussions about data deployment. 

By the end of the past year, we at WHC understand more than ever what we don’t need from initiatives or frameworks. We don’t need more infographics about interoperability. We don’t need any more passengers on the bandwagon.  

Here’s what we do need:    

• Acknowledgement that the system prefers the talkers to the doers 
• Embarking upon the nature-positive journey in small steps 
• The ability to say “no”  
• Better resourced nature teams in companies 
• Internal bridge-building to allow for better flows of data.  

As 2024 progresses, we look forward to continuing to implement these lessons as we support our corporate members in achieving wins for nature.  

As the only international NGO focused exclusively on enabling private sector action for nature, WHC has convened professionals working at the intersection of business and nature since 1990. This post is a transcript of WHC President Margaret O’Gorman’s 2023 State of Corporate Conservation speech, presented in Baltimore at the 2023 WHC Conservation Conference on June 20, 2023.

Good afternoon — it’s great to see everyone here today eager to learn, network and celebrate. We’ve curated a great conference for you over the next few days, and we know that you’re going to enjoy yourselves and leave here inspired to act for nature wherever you can.

It’s always a privilege to stand before this conference, to recognize your efforts and to provide some insights into the various aspects of our world, from what’s happening on the global stage to what’s happening in our own communities and workplaces. And there is a lot happening and changing. But while our world changes, the reason we gather remains constant. The reason we gather remains to celebrate conservation and ecological stewardship efforts — whether the completion of a nature restoration project, the success of a new pollinator meadow, adoption of a new corporate biodiversity ambition or interesting and uplifting engagements with communities around environmental education or STEM.

And the reason we do the work remains unchanged: Nature needs our help, and today, nature needs our help more than ever before. I don’t want to start our conference on a down note, but a recent report from the WWF tells us that there has been a 69% average decline in wildlife populations since 1970. This is my lifetime — an average 69% decline in populations of monitored species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish since I’ve been born. It’s very hard to conceptualize a loss of this scale, and it’s even more difficult to conjure a picture of projected future losses. In monetary terms, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, the picture is $577 billion at risk from the loss of pollinators alone. This is more than the combined value of the market cap of Toyota, Bayer, WM and Shell. That loss would be a massive hit to the global economy. But the bigger picture is a more emotional loss, seen and heard in the greying and quietening of our world as the colors and sounds of nature become hushed and muted. This loss means we won’t be handing the same vibrant planet we inherited to the generations who are not yet born.

The difficulty of conceptualizing this loss is one of the contributing factors to the fact that the nature crisis has been a lagging global concern when it should be, in my opinion, seen as important — if not more so — than the climate crisis. The difficulty in conceptualizing the loss, in measuring the loss and in disclosing the impacts of the loss, has delayed a much-needed consensus on how we should talk about it and how we should set aspirations or ambitions to address it. We tried on “no net loss/net positive impact” for a while but that didn’t fit. We’ve played with the mitigation hierarchy, but that is just an express lane to offsets. We’ve had the trillion-tree goal and the 30 by 30 initiative, but they don’t have a wide enough remit, excluding entire species and ecosystems. But a global goal has finally been determined, and that goal is to be nature positive by 2030.

So what does nature positive actually mean? The term is designed to be broad, but we’re all in agreement that nature positive means three things — recognizing the many values of nature, reversing the loss of biodiversity and moving towards nature recovery and regeneration. These are actions that most everyone at this conference are taking at the moment. These are actions that we are here to celebrate today and tomorrow.

Basically, nature positive is biodiversity’s net zero with a critical difference: While net zero is a destination, nature positive is a journey. No entity can ever claim to be “nature positive.” Whether an NGO, government agency, private citizen or private sector, no enterprises can claim with 100% certainty to be nature positive. But all can claim to be — and should be — on a journey towards nature positivity.

And the beauty of this approach is that you can take this journey in different ways, just like we all arrived here today along routes and using different forms of transportation and from different directions.

The private sector will take this journey in different ways and from different starting points. We know that. We at WHC have a deep understanding from working in this space for 35 years, and we know that there is no single defined route for a nature journey. We know that it’s not always straight, it’s not always moving in the right direction and there may be twists and turns on the way. We know that companies start their nature journeys in different places — sometimes at operations when EHS compliance on environmental regulations become beyond compliance for ecological reasons, sometimes at the corporate office when investors and rating agencies ask interesting questions.

We know that some companies get on the highway and speed towards their destinations on well-resourced roads, while others may follow the scenic route, take the U-turns and get diverted by every roadside attraction. Many run out of gas…repeatedly.

But conformity is not the most important aspect of this journey; being on the journey is what’s essential. We currently work with an alliance of life sciences companies to help engage the companies and their suppliers with nature, and each of them is starting in a different place and moving at different speeds.

Where do you think you are on your nature journey, and what type of road are you taking?  Is it swift and straight, slow and sinewy — or are you more like Ted Lasso at the moment, who says about traveling with Robert Frost, “It could go either way…”

The concept of nature positivity really came to the fore this past year, in advance of an important meeting that happened in Montreal in December. Last December saw one of the biggest gatherings for biodiversity on the planet at the 15th Conference of Parties to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD COP15), when delegations from more than 190 countries gathered with numerous observer delegations from across the world to agree on a new plan to turn the tide on the loss of nature. The meeting was two years late thanks to the global pandemic, and the sense of urgency was palpable as delegates gathered for long hours and fractious discussions to negotiate the wording for what would become the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which was adopted by the Convention delegates in late December. The framework sets out an ambitious pathway to reach the global vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050. It’s not as ambitious as nature positive by 2030, but what international treaty could ever be?

In 2016, I attended COP13 as part of the WHC delegation of two people. At COP15, WHC had a delegation of 15 people, including WHC members Covia, GM and others. At COP13, the business representation was small — Toyota and GM were present, and CEMEX led the way on a global Business and Biodiversity pledge. In Montreal, business was a significant segment of the meeting, and many voices from business were showcased talking about nature-positive ambitions and actions. And in the resulting global biodiversity framework, a specific target for business was agreed upon — the first time there is a role for business in this global convention.

The Business for Nature coalition, of which WHC is a partner, led the campaign to make it mandatory for business to report their nature-related risks, and indeed, Target 15 of the Global Biodiversity Framework asks that large and multinational businesses do just that and that the parties to the convention, the governments, support policy measures to encourage and enable business to engage with this target — which, yes, asks for reporting, but also looks for companies to act to reduce negative impacts and increase positive ones.

I have to clarify that the U.S. is not a party to the convention, but that matters little in these days of the global economy and the multinational companies many of you work for or the international supply chains you are all part of. Target 15 and supporting regulations will find its way to you. To help us understand more about Target 15 and the Global Biodiversity Framework, we have two sessions tomorrow — one looking at the global stage for biodiversity and another about how companies can build an ESG strategy that includes biodiversity.

While much of the attention on Target 15 focuses on reporting and disclosures, we here today are already achieving towards the part of Target 15 that seeks to increase business’s positive impacts on nature. We are so far into this aspect of Target 15 that we’re presenting 23 awards for outstanding positive impacts on nature over the next two days. Congratulations to the award winners announced this morning, and good luck to the nominees for the rest of this meeting.

So what does all this mean? This Global Biodiversity Framework, Target 15 and the infrastructure being developed to support it and other evolving initiatives seeking to drive a better business relationship with nature?

For one thing, it means that for the last year or so, I’ve had a serious case of the “told you so’s” as developments on the global, regional and national scales from think tanks and academics have validated the work that we have all been doing for the last 35 years enabling the private sector to act for nature.

What it also means is that finance and standards bodies are paying attention. Asset managers launched nine new biodiversity funds in 2022. Last year, the first biodiversity credits were sold, priced at $32 an acre. This year, for the first time, a company was excluded from an investment fund on the basis of biodiversity. CERES, the sustainable investing advocacy group, launched Nature 100 to mobilize investors to take actions to reduce nature loss and accelerate nature recovery.

ISO is issuing a standard in the field of biodiversity to develop principles, framework, requirements, guidance and supporting tools in a holistic and global approach for all organizations.

And to support all of this, there are more corporate positions with the title “Manager, Nature” that sit in sustainability offices. This particular fact impacted us this past year when one of our own, Josiane Bonneau, who many of you know, took her many talents to take a position of Manager, Nature at Freeport-McMoRan. We miss her a lot!

So: Bottom line, what does it all mean?

I think it means we should retire, once and for all, a question I am amazed still gets asked today. Given where we are on our nature journey, I am amazed that I still get asked for the business case for nature. I still get asked what the ROI on acting for nature is. I get asked why time and resources should be expended on biodiversity or other nature-based efforts.

When I’m asked the question today — “What’s the business case for nature? Why should business care about nature?” — I answer in three ways. The first and simplest answer to me is that we need nature for life, and if that’s not enough, my second answer is that there can be no business without nature. Just like businesses depend on financial capital to thrive, they also depend on natural capital to survive. If those two reasons are not enough, my third answer is that soon this question will be moot as business will be compelled to care about nature to comply with a suite of regulations and policies being developed to support the implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework.

I get it — the need to ask the question. I understand why, just 10 years ago, we had to wrap biodiversity and nature into a business case. It was only seven years ago that the World Economic Forum started to talk about biodiversity collapse as a significant risk to the global economy. It was only last year that business found a place in the global treaty for biodiversity, and only this year are frameworks like the Task Force for Nature Related Financial Disclosures and others emerging to support business engagement.

The business case for nature has been made. So let’s agree that we don’t need to ask anymore. The evidence is vast and beyond reproach. If anyone today is still asking what the business case for nature is, it’s not because they don’t know. It’s because they don’t want to know.

And this growing awareness is not just about the perils to nature; it’s also about the power of nature. Here in the U.S., realizations about the power of nature to alleviate some societal issues is taking root. The Inflation Reduction Act bill set aside billions of dollars to fight social inequities with nature-based solutions; e.g., the urban and community forestry program in the USFS has an annual appropriation of $32 million, and this year received an increase to $40 million — which is great, but it also received $1.5 billion in one-off funding to increase the health of our national urban forest and bring urban forestry benefits to the communities that bear an unfair burden of environmental impacts like urban heat islands, air pollution and even light and noise pollution. The EPA included nature-based solutions as an approved methodology in its most recent Pollution Prevention program, and last year the administration released a “Roadmap for Nature-Based Solutions to Fight Climate Change, Strengthen Communities, and Support Local Economies,” while this year, the “Campaign for Environmental Justice” was launched at the 21^st Urban Waters Partnership meeting, showing how much nature is being deployed to improve communities, lives and livelihoods.

It’s all happening for nature right now. Governments, companies, banks and NGOs are all at the starting line ready to take the nature-positive journey. And we here in this room are ready for it. We were born ready for this, and we’re looking forward to doing more, especially at the intersection of business, nature and community.

Across our 35-year history, WHC has worked with members where they work, and this sometimes means where communities have suffered impact from existing and legacy operations. Our newly named Social Impact team, led by Daniel Goldfarb, who is celebrating his 20^th year at WHC this year — can we hear it for Daniel’s two-decade commitment to the cause of corporate and community conservation? Daniel and his team has been working in these places for two decades, and in the last two months alone, have put in long hours and hectic days delivering nature to communities in Detroit, Chicago and northwest Indiana and almost 500 trees in the last few weeks alone in Detroit. This small but mighty team has convened companies to cross their fence lines and engage with the communities that host them, creating new relationships and helping companies deliver community benefits that are real, measurable and sustainable — and focused on the places where they are most needed.

The Social Impact team recently carried out some spatial analysis and found that of 528 certified programs in the USA, 70% lie within five miles of an overburdened community. This is a really interesting finding for WHC and its members because it shows that we are making a difference where it is needed and we have the power to make an even bigger difference to deploy nature to engineer resilience to the impacts of climate change, to make places where people can thrive and deliver healthy habitats for plants and animals to share space with us. We in this room have the ability to wield nature and deploy its power in the places that need it most.

We’re here to celebrate these places today and tomorrow as we recognize every conservation project that has made a difference and met requirements for certification. In 2022, we received applications from 283 unique programs, of which 280 were successful. Of the 280 successful applications, 58 received certification at the gold level, indicating that they are truly outstanding, and 54 were recognized at the silver level. We had 41 new programs seeking certification including certifications from new companies like Allegion, Blue Triton Brands, Grupo Mexico, Lannon Stone Products, Molex and others.

We worked with 38 reviewers in 2022, with each program receiving two reviews to ensure consistency of scoring, and these reviewers look at each program through its constituent projects. They reviewed 364 habitat projects, 387 species projects and 183 education projects. The top themes continue to be Grassland, Landscaped and Wetlands habitat projects, Avian and Pollinator species projects and Awareness and Community engagement in our education projects. We continue to see strong representation in our Other category for Species of Concern and Green Infrastructure projects. Let’s celebrate all of our certified programs with a round of applause for everyone who submitted an application in 2022. Thank you for your hard work.

This year, we had a series of really interesting projects from Mexico, like Vulcan Material’s SAC-TUN site’s program in the Yucatan Peninsula in Quintana Roo, Mexico. This program focuses on collecting data to better understand the conservation needs and status of threatened and endangered species such as the jaguar, Nassau grouper and Caribbean spiny lobster. The site, which I visited many years ago, contains over 1,000 hectares of forests and is home to at least 130 species of plants and 384 vertebrates, including 21 that are endemic to Mexico. In addition, the team conducts conservation activities in Ejido Manuel Antonio Ay. The project is part of Vulcan’s long-term environmental strategy, to restore exploited lands, reduce the impact of new operations and position the company as a leader in the conservation of the Mesoamerican Reef, the second most important coral reef on the planet.

Another partner in Mexico, the Earth Lab, is also working with ejido communities and received certification for a jaguar conservation program in Ejido Sisal, which has almost 3,000 hectares under management for this iconic species as well as managing forests and intertidal zones.

Another iconic species in Mexico and the U.S. that came to our attention this year is the Mexican grey wolf. When the Mexican grey wolf was declared functionally extinct in the wild in 1976 and officially listed under the Endangered Species Act, the United States and Mexico collaborated to capture all Mexican grey wolves remaining in the wild to prevent their extinction. Five wild Mexican wolves were captured alive in Mexico from 1977 to 1980 and used to start a captive breeding program. After the Mexican Wolf Recovery Plan was implemented, wolves were reintroduced into recovery areas in Arizona and New Mexico beginning in 1998 in order to recolonize the animals’ historical range. From those five wolves captured in the late 70s, there are now 241 wild Mexican wolves in the U.S. and 45 in Mexico.

This year, WHC certified Grupo México’s grey wolf rehabilitation program located in the Buenavista del Cobre Wildlife Conservation Management Unit in Sonora, Mexico. Since 2013, Buenavista del Cobre joined as one location of a large network of places that work together to help rehabilitate and ultimately re-release the Mexican grey wolves which are assigned every year by the Binational Committee that oversees the recovery effort. Fifty-nine wolves have been cared for, and 23 wolves have been born at UMA Buenavista del Cobre. Fifty percent of the Mexican wolves that have been released into the wild in Mexico come from this program.

This program is an excellent example that really captures collaboration from start to finish, first between the U.S. and Mexican governments to start this rehabilitation program in the late 1970s, then between Grupo México, NGOs and government to implement a rehabilitation programs, and finally WHC providing recognition by certifying those efforts of Grupo México.

It’s also an example of how nature positive is journey across time and space. It’s an example of all the great things we are here in Baltimore to celebrate. And we’ll also be celebrating Baltimore while we are here this week. As some of you know, Baltimore was once the permanent location of our conference. This is our first time back here since 2020, and our first time during the summer, so long-term conference attendees will experience a different city from when our conference was in November.

This year, we will have a mainstage panel about conservation collaborations in Baltimore, where we’ll hear about the efforts of the National Aquarium to connect with communities; the challenges of creating an urban wood economy; the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, which has been taking the measure of Baltimore’s biodiversity since 1989; and we’ll learn about Mr. Trash Wheel, the iconic trash interceptor in the inner harbor.

In addition, we will celebrate Baltimore’s vibrant makers’ community with our second-annual Makers’ Pavilion, where you can meet local craftspeople and buy local, independently made gifts. The Makers’ Pavilion will be open from 10:00 a.m. tomorrow. I am really looking forward to it — all proceeds from the Makers’ Pavilion go to the makers themselves.

For those of you who are here for the first time, please enjoy Baltimore and for long-time attendees, please enjoy Baltimore in the summer. And speaking of enjoyment, please remember that enjoyment of our awards dinner is on you and the spirit you bring to it. I know some of you already have plans and props to make sure you’re seen at the dinner. I invite you all to bring your best team spirit and celebrate corporate conservation and each other.

I’d like to acknowledge the hard work of our communications team, who produced the next two days of content. This team is also responsible for all our non-conference content, our webinars and white papers. WHC webinars are all available for free. Besides our 15 live webinars a year, we offer a library of over 100 webinars on a wide variety of nature-based topics to educate and inspire.

Our most popular webinar in the past year was “Building Insect Hotels: Enhancing Hospitality for Bugs, Bees and Beetles,” where we announced our 2^nd Insect Hotel Challenge. If you haven’t viewed the webinar yet, it’s on our website, and the deadline to submit your bug hotel for consideration is September 1, so there’s still a lot of time to start building your hotels.

We also released three very popular white papers this year. One on STEM education, one on how to develop robust corporate-community relations and a more technical paper on invasive species. All our generous sponsors for webinars and white papers allow us to deliver quality content to you.

This year we must celebrate some board members who cycled off our board in recent months. Our fabulous chair Sheryl Telford retired from Chemours, long-time board member John Hay of CRH retired from the board, and extremely long-time board member Greg Cekander retired from the board. All have led WHC with engagement and commitment and will be missed, but we also welcomed new members Chris May from CRH, Bryan Tindell from WM, Amber Wellman from Chemours and, of course, our new chair Connie Hergert from OPG. We thank our outgoing board members and welcome incoming members. Also, please welcome Anna Willingshofer to our team. Anna just joined us as our first Chief Science and Innovation officer to help us harmonize our offerings with the variety of efforts happening for nature across the world, helping to steer WHC on its continuing journey.

Part of this journey happens in WHC’s consulting services, where our team continues to respond to the needs of both members and non-members. This past year has seen requests for engagements that are supporting companies on their journeys. From our desks, we’ve completed a number of biodiversity benchmarking exercises for our members, using publicly available data on industry sector’s reporting, disclosures and commitments for nature. This has been a fascinating activity for the consulting team but also for our member companies who are looking for a sound starting point. We’re helping other members take the work they’ve done to prepare for climate reporting as a starting point for nature-based reporting, helping them to see where they have data gaps and process needs to tool-up for being engaged in the coming reporting mandates.

And from this effort, we have found that the best starting point for the corporate nature journey is at operations, where data is being collected for a variety of reasons and where work is being done to create positive outcomes for wildlife, for habitat, for overall environmental health.

It’s been out in the field helping design and deliver high-quality conservation programs also that the team has enjoyed meeting people and hearing stories. Gwen Harris, Doreen Tadde and Rob Campbell have been out with Toyota to help identify options for nature-based solutions at four of their manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and Canada. These efforts will allow the company to convert currently manicured lawns, that do not support biodiversity in any meaningful way, into thriving habitats using native species. Toyota will continue this work across its footprint this year as they work towards a global corporate goal to “Operate In Harmony with Nature.”

This year, Joey Mendolia organized and led a microforest planting at a WM facility in Indianapolis. A microforest, or Miyawaki forest, is a novel approach to tree planting that uses a mixture of soil improvements, dense planting design and a diversity of species to create a small forest that becomes established quicker than normal forestry planting approaches. Microforests are increasingly popular with WHC members because they hit that sweet spot of providing for nature, engaging employees and connecting with communities. We have plans with WM to install a second microforest in the fall and develop a microforest toolkit to allow WM to replicate the success of these planting methods at WM sites across North America.

Joey’s work with the WM team at the Indianapolis White River site was made a lot easier by the engagement of retiree George Peregrim, who brought a font of knowledge and a can-do problem-solving attitude to the effort. Joey would like a George Peregrim at all subsequent WM microforest events.

Jacque Williamson has worked with Chemours Chamber Works and Salem County Community College in New Jersey to develop a middle school environmental science curriculum and will be leading an educators training workshop in the fall.

We also supported the Shell Eco-Marathon event at Indianapolis Motor Speedway where the speedway connected a group of 7th graders with WHC staff who introduced the group to the concepts of business working to support biodiversity and then carried out a nature scavenger hunt at the property. To fully prepare the students, we developed a fact sheet on nature-based solutions, which we delivered to students prior to the on-site event. The intention is to have the 7^th grade students weigh in on the nature-based solutions that could possibly be implemented at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

And during Earth Week this year, we partnered with Friends of the Rouge to plant 198 trees and shrubs with Salina Elementary and Intermediate schools in Dearborn’s south end, outside of Detroit. The team planted in sessions with one class from the elementary school partnered with one class from the intermediate, so the younger kids had an older buddy to guide them on planting. But the children from the kindergarten classes took the reins on the planting and ended up instructing all the older kids on how and where to plant, yelling at their middle school buddies to “Watch out for our trees!” and instructing them on how important trees were! Savanna Delise told me that it was so exciting to see how passionate even the youngest of kids can be when they’re helping to green their community, and she said all of the students were grateful to participate in planting events during Earth Week on their own school’s campus, even though the events ended up being run by the youngest students!

Our support efforts for companies continue to connect us to many local partners across the globe. For two years now, we’ve supported Xerox as they’ve sought to provide their employees, who mostly work from home, with an excuse to get together with nature as the backdrop. In Washington, D.C., we partner with Rock Creek Conservancy, whose forest resiliency manager Ashley Triplett welcomed government affairs folk and others to support restoration efforts in Rock Creek Park, the national park located in the heart of our nation’s capital. While in the heart of another world capital, London, we worked with Margaret Ruttle from the London Wildlife Trust to deliver three ecological restoration efforts with Xerox employees. This transatlantic effort was made possible by our global network of friends and partners who all operate where business and nature is.

And this aspect of our network resulted in a very sweet story this year that I heard from Bill Cobb at Freeport McMoRan. Bill sent me a news clipping with the headline “Cerro Verde Helps Stray Guanaco Baby Find its Herd.” A family traveling near the Cerro Verde operations in Peru found a chulengo, a baby guanaco, wandering on the old Pan-American Highway near the mine. The family took the chulengo to the mine because the mine is well known in the region for its work to protect animals. The on-site veterinarian provided first aid to the chulengo and waited for the National Forestry and Wildlife Service to send someone. The government professional also checked the calf. The team at the mine found a herd of guanaco that the chulengo likely belonged to and watched as it was quickly accepted by one of the females. The subject line of Bill’s email was “Thought you would find this story touching…” and I did, but I also found it verifying. The reputation of the Cerro Verde operation for their care of animal populations is not an accident — it is a result of the hard work of the mine operators and Freeport’s support for working the land while protecting the species that use it.

And our members have found so many ways to effect positive change for nature. Last September, OPG convened a meeting of energy companies to discuss climate and nature and how the sector is moving towards low carbon and nature positivity. The formal part of the convening was a great success, and we had many interesting conversations, but the field trip to OPG’s Sir Adam Beck Pump Generating Station was the most inspiring. We met Nancy Laser, who is responsible for many environmental projects at the complex, but who is very passionate about the goat program she created. Nancy led the group to see the goats at work, happily and hungrily eating phragmites, an invasive species that impacts many aspects of the operations including impeding access to stations for monitoring water quality and quantity. What really inspired me from this outing was Nancy’s passion for improving the project by learning more about the biology and psychology of the goats. Starting with the initial idea of using goats as ecological management, Nancy was able to tell us visitors about how the goats’ digestive systems are uniquely qualified to digest phragmites, how their chewing motion help make any seeds nonviable and how what comes out the other end serves as nutrients recycled back into the ground by the goats’ hooves. Because goats are easily spooked creatures, Nancy has learned about bringing in sheep to act as a calming presence to ensure they’d settle and eat. And if all this is not enough, the goats also contribute to infrastructure maintenance as they love the vines that grow on the fence line, thus reducing maintenance costs by extending the life of the fence. The goats have cleared 140,000 square feet of phragmites, allowing native species to thrive.

What struck me most about Nancy’s work is the journey she is on — one of education and increasing impact. Yes, we’re all on a journey towards nature positive. We’re all taking it in different ways whether through learning, leading or sometimes just getting out of the way.

Whether it’s deploying goats in Niagara, rescuing guanacos in Peru or convening with colleagues to plant trees wherever you can, you’re on the journey. You’re on the journey when you’re collecting data, generating reports and even answering questions from CEOs, CFOs and investors. It’s definitely in the pollinator garden where you work and the ecological restoration effort where you live. It’s in every outdoor lesson that engages children or every tree planting that engages your friends and colleagues.

We all definitely know that the journey contains setbacks — fighting for more budget to act, seeking more staff to deliver data, searching for water to keep microforests and other planting efforts alive and dealing with droughts, floods and in some cases wildfires.

In that case heed the words of Samuel Beckett when he said: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Reflecting on failing, one of the most common setbacks we see is in the churn of roles and responsibilities and strength of engagement with respect to nature. Companies need to commit fully to get to where we need to go. The goal is nature positive by 2030 — that’s a mere 6 ½ years. It’s not a long time, so we need to focus on the goal and accelerate our pace on this important journey.

This journey is helped by the stories you hear and the stories you tell. It’s in the acts of conservation that you do, the results you get and the results you wish to get. But it’s mostly in the people you meet along the way. The people we meet make this long and sometimes challenging journey worthwhile. It’s the Nancys and Georges of this world who bring passion and knowledge to every act of conservation. It’s the kindergarteners in Dearborn who are leveraging their excitement and energy to make their community heathier and greener. It’s every person, whether from corporate or operations, who have enabled nature to thrive in so many different ways.

It’s you. Here today in Baltimore. So, learn a lot and laugh a lot, and when you return to your workplaces, plant some of the learning and maybe some of the laughing into your teams to inspire others to join us on this important journey.

Thank you.