Big News About Biodiversity Makes Grim Predictions – Why Aren’t We Paying More Attention?

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A recently published paper found that biodiversity received 8 times less media coverage than climate change in the mainstream media. This inequity in coverage reflects a trend that began around 2000 and has continued to increase every year since. Today, biodiversity is almost completely absent from the pages of our newspapers, websites or TV screens, apart from the occasional feel-good story about hawks breeding on city skyscrapers, ducklings being helped by traffic cops or the latest arrival at the local zoo.

There are many reasons put forward by the paper’s authors for the discrepancy in coverage, including the more telegenic nature of large-scale catastrophic events, the clear human impact of climate change, the global scale of the problem and the fact that the human role in climate change remains controversial, which in turn generates headlines.

Given these findings, it should come as no surprise that a recent report with significant news about the state of the world’s biodiversity has been largely underreported. In March, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) published its first global assessment of the state of nature since 2005. Regional assessments looking at Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe and Central Asia paint a grim picture of a variety of threats to biodiversity in different parts of the world and make predictions about the implications.

In Europe and Central Asia, the report found that wetlands have declined by 50% since the 1970s. Marine and coastal ecosystems, which can contribute up to 35% of GDP for some African countries, are under severe threat from development, climate change and urbanization. In the Americas, close to 24% of the 14,000 species assessed are considered at risk of extinction. In Asia and the Pacific, agrobiodiversity is in decline due to intensification, and with that decline, indigenous and local knowledge of ecosystems and biodiversity is being lost.

Considering these new assessments, the 20 Aichi Targets adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as part of their strategic plan suddenly seem increasingly unattainable by the goal date of 2020. The targets call for, among other things, halving the rate of habitat loss and bringing it close to zero by 2020, as well as preventing the extinction of known threatened species and improving the conservation status of all declining species by the same deadline.  These assessments suggest that while some progress has been made towards the goals, the likelihood of them being achieved remains slim.

This important news was absent from the nightly news and the front pages of newspapers and news sites, but it was widely discussed in the international conservation community.

The Chair of IPBES, Robert Watson, called for immediate action at a level commensurate with the problem, which he declared to be as dangerous to humans as climate change. Jake Rice, a co-chair of the Americas assessment, called on everyone to make a “fundamental change in how we live as individuals, communities and corporations.”

Cristina Pașca Palmer, the Executive Secretary of the CBD and the UN’s top nature official, told The Guardian that our current rate of species loss is “mega-urgent.” She sees value in every attempt to reverse these dire trends and is pushing for all solutions to be considered and for efforts that include restoration and transformation to be counted toward securing nature, as well as the more traditional valuation, protection and restriction approaches. She understands that in both the developing and developed world, enough land cannot realistically be set aside to meet this goal. Instead she wants to broaden approaches to conservation beyond preservation and increase sustainable practices to reduce the impact on nature.

What Ms. Pașca Palmer is saying sounds like common sense, but it is quietly revolutionary. The international conservation community in which the CBD operates focuses almost exclusively on the hotspots for biodiversity—the wild and pristine places of the globe. In doing so, this focus creates a sense that nature is “over there” and not part of our everyday reality and experience of the planet.

When we read and hear these feel-good stories about ducks crossing the road, hawks breeding on city skyscrapers and the latest arrival at the local zoo, we are experiencing nature. When we engage in an effort to clean a park, we are restoring a habitat. When we plant milkweed for monarch butterflies, we are contributing to the conservation of a declining species. While we can support the preservation of wild and pristine places with our dollars and our votes, we can also better integrate nature into our lives with our own actions. We can help increase coverage of the issue by clicking on those stories online, by amplifying the messages across our social media, and by working to make #biodiversity a trending topic that receives the attention it truly deserves.

The Importance of Mainstreaming Biodiversity

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In November 2018, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will convene its 14th Convention of the Parties (COP 14.)  At the meeting, it will discuss mainstreaming biodiversity in energy and mining, infrastructure and manufacturing and processing. In preparation for this meeting, the CBD invited submissions from NGO partners and others to provide case studies and practical examples of the mainstreaming of biodiversity into the industry sectors under consideration. The following is WHC’s submission to the CBD.

  1. Wildlife Habitat Council – 30 Years Working with Industry

WHC has worked at the intersection of business and biodiversity for 30 years. In that time, it has developed a method of mainstreaming biodiversity into industry that does not rely on industry- or nation-specific tools, policies and practices. Instead, it creates a framework focused on the specific corporation that recognizes the needs of: corporate leadership to report positive outcomes; operations managers to support non-essential activities; and employees and community members to engage in meaningful ways that meet both ecological and social goals.

This framework requires a company to define a business need for biodiversity management. It also encourages a company to develop a strategic corporate conservation plan that outlines biodiversity objectives, assigns resources to biodiversity implementation, and develops KPIs for biodiversity reporting focused on action. By aligning conservation efforts with a business need, biodiversity evolves from an arm’s-length philanthropic activity to an integrated, scalable company-wide program.

WHC works across industry sectors and international boundaries applying the same approach and framework regardless of local governance, operations type or ecoregion. With this approach, it has recognized over 600 programs in 22 countries from 100 global and national corporations with WHC Conservation Certification, the only voluntary sustainability standard designed for broad-based biodiversity enhancement activities. While Conservation Certification is a site-specific standard, its strength lies in its value as a consolidated metric for corporate reporting.

The design of Conservation Certification as a consolidated metric increases its use as a mainstreaming tool by providing flexibility to all land uses and all industry sectors. For example: a company with a value chain that stretches from large extraction facilities through mid-sized production and smaller distribution venues can use the standard at all facilities. In doing so, this changes the corporate perception of biodiversity management from being the exclusive purview of upstream extractive operations to instead being applicable to all locations. While the biodiversity impact at the larger landscape scale may be greater, the participation of all parts of the value chain leads to mainstreaming which results in institutional engagement over one-off, unique projects.

  1. Business Drivers

WHC has identified 16 drivers for business to engage in mainstreaming biodiversity. These drivers are beyond compliance and can be organized mostly within a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) paradigm and associated business expectations recently emerged from 21st century concerns for human health and the environment.

The primary drivers of biodiversity within a CSR paradigm are social license to operate and, its close relative, government relations. Social license to operate can be secured through community relations. This may include education activities that meet corporate priorities for workforce development to hire and sustain engaged employees, especially through increasingly frequent post-merger and acquisition integration. These approaches can then provide a positive key performance indicator (KPI) for reporting and disclosures activities that may be leveraged to address activist shareholders and the needs of socially responsible investment funds.

In addition, and as an outcome of increased expectations of business in the 21st century, biodiversity is increasingly being incorporated into risk management, which has evolved beyond traditional economic risks to a focus on non-traditional environment, social and governance risks that now promote enhanced approaches to biodiversity in both new and ongoing operations. The result is better reclamation and remediation outcomes that incorporate nature-based solutions and result in significant cost savings.

The starting point to mainstream biodiversity into industry is the business driver and clarity around the value of biodiversity within a business context. Fostering understanding by corporate leaders that biodiversity management efforts meet business challenges and opportunities is an effective and proven way to advance biodiversity actions and goals. When biodiversity management is seen to contribute to a solution it is viewed in a more favorable manner and resources are allocated to it. Once biodiversity management becomes part of a corporate KPI, mainstreaming has occurred, leading to subsequent improvements and significant expansion of efforts.

  1. A Framework Versus A Tool

Once the business driver and the value of biodiversity has been recognized, a framework for action and mainstreaming can be built. By building a simple framework to mainstream biodiversity, corporations can then deploy the variety of tools available like valuation systems, spatial planning approaches, strategic environmental assessments, offset strategies and the mitigation hierarchy. A framework must also be the starting point for direct action and implementation. In addition, implementation within this business value framework can be used to report on objectives and impacts in line with the variety of existing global, regional and local goals including the global Strategic Development Goals (SDGs), national or regional biodiversity targets, and other ecological targets.

In short, the business driver approach recognizes the corporation as the organizing unit for action and allows external tools, policies and measures to be embraced and implemented appropriate to the specific context.

CEMEX, a global leader in the building materials industry, embraced the framework approach by working with partners towards different ecological impacts. CEMEX partnered with Bird Life International to develop a Biodiversity Action Plan Guidance which is being advanced at pilot sites in areas of high biodiversity value in five countries. It then partnered with WHC at locations not considered to be of high biodiversity value. At these locations, CEMEX overlaid a biodiversity theme to its education and outreach efforts and integrated its biodiversity management with its award-winning community outreach efforts. To date 24 CEMEX facilities are implementing conservation actions and associated education programs across the Americas. By creating a biodiversity framework and linking it to business value, CEMEX has mainstreamed biodiversity in an inclusive and sustainable manner.

Freeport-McMoRan, a leading international mining company, created a framework for mainstreaming biodiversity by enabling action on its corporate commitment to the environment that is expressed in different ways at different locations throughout the world. The basis for the commitment is to be compliant with all required rules and regulations but to go beyond compliance where practicable to enhance the quality to the environment where the company operates. The company’s policy commits Freeport-McMoran to contributing to the conservation of biodiversity and is aligned to International Council on Mining and Minerals 10 Principles. This integration has seen biodiversity action in restoration, reclamation and remediation projects as well as in corporate citizenship community outreach and education efforts. By creating the framework, Freeport-McMoRan allows action to cascade from corporate commitment to community impact.

  1. The Commonalities

Across all industry sectors, a set of commonalities make the approach possible and replicable. Most every company regardless of industry sector consists of leaders, employees and stakeholders and follow a similar path of planning, design, execution and measurement on processes both large and small. All companies operate in a community, impact the land and use the resources, and each has a business reason to engage in biodiversity management. These commonalties depress the importance of state actors and make voluntary conservation action possible regardless of local governance.

General Motors (GM), the global automotive manufacturer, embraced these commonalities to mainstream biodiversity across its operations. GM following an industrial benchmarking exercise and stakeholder input developed a global sustainability goal to engage all of its manufacturing facilities in biodiversity programs by 2020 and is currently on track to meet this goal. The goal intersects with GM’s employee engagement and community outreach goals and feeds into its reporting on the SDGs.

By embracing the commonalities, GM successfully rolled out a global program of biodiversity management that has to date engaged 71 facilities in 14 countries under one biodiversity metric. While using the framework approach, GM allowed different operations to adopt appropriate tools and approaches that would be locally relevant and increase odds of success and contribute to a global effort. So successful is GM’s approach that when GM divested itself of its Opel/Vauxhall brand, the new company continued to embrace its GM-inspired biodiversity efforts despite the loss of GM resources to support them.

In U.S. state of Michigan, DTE Energy, a regional utility company with generation, distribution and office locations in the city of Detroit, embraced the commonalities of place to engage different parts of the operations in biodiversity management efforts. In underserved urban neighborhoods of Detroit, greening efforts around office locations help improve community aesthetics but also storm-water management. At power plants in industrial neighborhoods, biodiversity programs enhance the environment for the community and create ecological connectivity. By enabling such projects at office locations, power plants, service centers and compressor stations, DTE Energy mainstreams biodiversity into its operations, and in recent years, pushed its supply chain to make the same effort. The business value of DTE Energy’s biodiversity management is integrated into the DTE Energy mission to be a key element in Michigan’s economic and environmental future.

  1. Existing Challenges and Opportunities

The main challenge to mainstreaming biodiversity in industry sectors is the continued promotion of tools over frameworks. When specific tools are being promoted as the only solution to address corporate biodiversity needs, the tool will be adopted – but its adoption will not drive mainstreaming as other operations will be excluded from the tool’s implementation. It is only by understanding the needs of the specific organization will biodiversity be mainstreamed. Showing a company how it can leverage its biodiversity work to meet a business challenge and allowing it to build a supporting framework within which appropriate tools are deployed will create the circumstances for success.

The promotion of tools over frameworks is frequently driven by competition between civic society groups seeking to secure contracts of work with the corporate sector without acknowledgement that the tool is not comprehensive and will not meet the needs of the entire company. Articulation of the limitations of tools and processes is critical for success in mainstreaming biodiversity. Recognition of the value of a suite of tools and approaches within a single business-focused framework remains an opportunity not yet fully realized.

Other challenges remain as follows:

  • The tyranny of metrics and the complexification of conservation – The tools and practices being advanced by large international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and government development agencies remain beyond the reach of corporations that are not included on annual lists of top 500 companies by revenue. The tools require resource investments not available to all companies, and prescriptions for implementation tend to be academic in tone and not reflective of the operating environment. In addition, the fixation on complex metrics and the collection of data to support such metrics can be a significant barrier to entry.
  • The competing priorities of national and state government entities – WHC has long recognized what it has termed “the unintended consequences of good behavior” which sometimes result when business improves its land stewardship with conservation-focused activities that are permitted and promoted by the government agency which governs natural resources management, and are then viewed in a less favorable light by agencies focused on regulatory compliance. Since compliance generally trumps non-essential operations, efforts at conservation stewardship can easily be discouraged.

Opportunities exist to address these challenges especially with the current focus on mainstreaming in the industry sectors under consideration. At the national level, efforts must be undertaken to impress on government agencies the need to amplify NBSAPs outside of natural resources agencies and impel regulatory agencies to support the objectives of NBSAPs and understand the implications of their own regulations on biodiversity management. In many regulatory frameworks, the economic impacts of new regulations are expressed when regulations are developed, the environmental impacts should also be expressed in relation to NBSAPs.

Within the NGO community of practice, the need for pragmatic partnerships focused on the reality of operations beyond the C-suite is critical. High level “exclusive” partnerships that, while attractive to C-suite leadership, effectively tie the hands of local operations, limit biodiversity outcomes and create distrust of such initiatives. For real mainstreaming to happen implementation must be valued as much as conceptual tools and innovative technology. A matrix of opportunities and decision guidelines for companies could greatly aid corporate decision-making that would then enhance the odds of success and on-the-ground change. Such an approach would allow companies to make the right choices when entering into partnership efforts with NGOs.

To successfully mainstream biodiversity into operations, CBD and its NGO partners must pivot and view industry and its business needs as opportunities for biodiversity mainstreaming and not obstacles. By truly understanding the operational and governance needs of business, CBD can drive change at the national level. By likewise understanding the operational needs of business and corporate commonalities and acknowledging that no single tool represents a sole solution, NGO partners can open avenues for interactions with corporations that result in systematic, replicable change on-the-ground.

Toward COP14: Can the CBD Mainstream Biodiversity in Industry?

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Government alone cannot save the world’s biodiversity. Understanding this, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is currently considering the role of the private sector in helping achieve the Aichi Targets1. This evolution in CBD thinking has been helped along by the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by businesses around the world, as well as the unyielding corporate support for the Paris Climate Agreement. At a time when business is flexing its citizenship muscles on global issues, the CBD is taking notice.

During the recent meeting of the CBD’s Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA21), an important item on the agenda was the discussion of mainstreaming of biodiversity into industry. More than 30 countries contributed interventions when the issue was considered during the plenary session and lively discussions were had at the numerous side events that addressed specific instruments or issues with respect to finalizing a proposal for adoption at the forthcoming COP14 (14th meeting of the Conference of the Parties, the governing body of the CBD) in November 2018.

As acknowledged by the participants at the SBSTTA21 meeting and in the subsequently adopted Recommendation, mainstreaming is complicated. For one, the CBD is a governmental body informed by civil society groups, where knowledge of private sector drivers and concerns is not comprehensive. Additionally, the ability of government to enact transformational change in the corporate sector is driven by each country’s taste for imposing a broad biodiversity-focused framework on business across the lifecycle.

There remains a lot to be discussed in the run-up to COP14, but some common threads emerged during discussions at SBSTTA21 that can inform the work, as follows:

  • There is no silver bullet. Discussions around strengthening the enabling environment for Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA), deploying ecosystem service valuation approaches, placing more stringent biodiversity requirements in financing agreements, and integrating SEAs into upstream planning efforts will all work in different ways in different industry sectors and in different jurisdictions. No single instrument or policy will, by itself, cause the transformational change needed. With this imperative in mind, the CBD must develop cross-sectoral strategies that can be adapted for, and within, different industries.
  • Business must be involved in the discussion. Apart from IPIECA (the global oil and gas industry association for environmental and social issues), there was no other business or business association in the room at SBSSTA21, yet there was a strong consensus that CBD and its stakeholders did not have the expertise required to deliver practical yet achievable policy proposals that would drive the necessary transformation. Mexico and other countries are tackling this issue by building alliances with business and convening expert panels to address this knowledge gap – these efforts should be supported.
  • Inherent tensions exist in this effort. For all nations, industry is a key economic driver, and many developing countries welcome extractive industries as wealth creators. However, industry is also a key driver of biodiversity loss. In addition, the infrastructure needs of many countries can outweigh the push to protect biodiversity, while political realities often impact the speed with which development is permitted and new policies are implemented. In many jurisdictions, biodiversity efforts in the ministry of the environment may be in direct conflict with permitting in a ministry of energy or mines. The relationship between a country’s economy and the resources they are charged to protect is a complex one and needs to be recognized in discussions and planning of industry expansion and its role in biodiversity protection.
  • Bigger than a single COP. Effecting transformative change in one industry sector is difficult, yet the CBD seeks to effect such change across multiple sectors. The scope of the issue is beyond a single COP meeting and many countries who contributed interventions at SBSTTA21 made this point. If the COP adopts a mainstreaming decision, it must invest in future initiatives that focus on the individual industry sectors. In its current incarnation, the mainstreaming proposal includes the industries of energy and mining, infrastructure, manufacturing and processing, and health. Many of these sectors are individually complex and overlap across sectors multiply this complexity.

At the end of the day, mainstreaming biodiversity into industry will require a cultural shift in individual companies whereby all business units are engaged in valuing biodiversity protection and restoration. But to help business make this shift, a culture change is also needed across the CBD and its partner NGOs. The business and biodiversity function in the CBD secretariat is currently under-resourced during this critical time. Only one position in the entire secretariat is devoted to this important work, and it is mostly focused internally. With a lack of resources, it is no surprise that, apart from IPIECA, the industry sectors under consideration were not well represented at either COP13 or SBSTTA21.

To meaningfully mainstream biodiversity into the five industry sectors under consideration, the CBD must: recognize and utilize the full variety of approaches, tools and frameworks available; perform outreach to industry sectors to understand their everyday reality, from the C-suite to the factory floor; and maximize meaningful industry participation at COP14 by planning and communicating in a more business-friendly manner with business-friendly timelines.

Despite the challenges, mainstreaming biodiversity into industry is a worthwhile effort. Similar initiatives have taken root before. Over decades, business has prioritized the issue of safety to such a point that it is now in the very DNA of companies and their employees. As certain companies integrated safety as an imperative company value, this idea permeated to other companies and has since become mainstreamed across industries. Biodiversity can be mainstreamed across business in much the same way, allowing both economic livelihoods and natural communities to prosper.

  1. The Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 is comprised of a shared vision, a mission, strategic goals and 20 ambitious yet achievable targets, collectively known as the Aichi Targets. https://www.cbd.int/sp/

Read more WHC blogs.

The Greening of Detroit – How DTE Energy and GM are Helping to Restore Nature in America’s Comeback City

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No other American city seems to fascinate like Detroit. Its rise, its fall and its rebirth have been captured by authors, movie makers, historians, planners, rappers and entrepreneurs. From its population peak of 1.8 million in 1950, the city’s decline started slowly and remained unnoticed until it flirted with bankruptcy beginning in 2012. In recent years, Detroit’s rebirth has been powered by continued commitments of locally-grown companies like DTE Energy and General Motors innovations of new urban agricultural pioneers, the emergence of the now iconic brand Shinola, and the investment of Quicken Loans and others in the Downtown, Midtown and New Center areas. And while this renaissance has been secured in the city’s commercial center, many of the surrounding neighborhoods remain empty and abandoned – with the exception of nature re-exerting itself in a powerful way. The city known as the Arsenal of Democracy, Paris of the Midwest and The Motor City, among many other nicknames, was this year also dubbed the “City of Queen Anne’s Lace” by Cuban artists Alejandro Campins and José Yaque, after the plant began colonizing the city’s empty lots.

But when it comes to nature in Detroit, there’s so much more beyond any sobriquet. This past July, board members of the Wildlife Habitat Council toured five corporate conservation program sites in and around Detroit. These programs illustrated the breadth of possible conservation opportunities, the power of innovation and imagination, and the role corporations can take in leading nature back into a city.

These five locations are proof positive that every act of conservation matters.

DTE Energy’s Downtown Detroit Headquarters Complex is a visible reminder of the company’s commitment to remain in the city following its merger with MCN Energy Group. Expanding on this footprint, DTE Energy recently added to the city’s vibrant park scene with the development and opening of Beacon Park, a key piece in its community improvement efforts. Nearby, the LEED-certified Navitas House, a redevelopment project that provides a workplace for 140 DTE Energy employees in a former Salvation Army building, contains green infrastructure and other ecological design features that helped secure WHC Conservation Certification in 2000. The pollinator garden, rain garden/bioswale and bat box were installed and are managed to bring nature and visual interest to a neighborhood with a lot more pavement than plants.

DTE Energy also showed its creative conservation efforts at the River Rouge Power Plant. Here, a passionate team of volunteers softened the shoreline, created tern nesting sites, restored a lawn into a prairie, and created and installed a beautiful sculpture to celebrate it all. The setting is industrial, but the team’s efforts have created a greenbelt around the site from the river to their next-door neighbors, reducing runoff into the river and visual blight within the community. The plant maximizes its restoration efforts by opening its lands for education, most specifically hosting classes of at-risk high school students for outdoor experiences and learning. The team members that hosted WHC’s tour were passionate about their work and rightly proud of their efforts and the many ways their stewardship benefits the community.

In some corners of Detroit, communities no longer exist, having fallen prey to abandonment following outward migration from the city, and causing an increase in unsafe places where fragments of neighborhoods retain just enough empty homes to be an attractive nuisance. In one such neighborhood bordering a Marathon Petroleum refining site, abandonment became opportunity as Marathon developed a vision for the neighborhood to connect downriver Detroit communities to the Rouge and Detroit rivers. Marathon Gardens Vision Plan is a community-centric development strategy focused on building green connections by growing a forest where there were once houses, restoring a prairie in place of sidewalks, and managing park-like spaces with community agriculture and outdoor education as resources to facilitate positive interactions between residents and nature. Standing at this project, WHC board members were awed by the serene location (despite the nearby highway), and the sense of peace in a place that was once dangerous.

General Motors presented our tour with two completely contrasting approaches to corporate conservation. At the Warren Technical Center, a designated National Historic Landmark, GM showed that native plantings can stand on their own against the work of iconic architect Eero Saarinen. Milkweed and evening primrose are planted in what were originally formal lawns and are now providing habitat for monarchs, as well as color and interest for employees. Across the Tech Center site, pockets of habitat thrive: in the former on-site tree nursery, a forest is taking shape; along buffer areas, no-mow zones reduce maintenance, save costs and support insect life; and throughout the site, bee blocks, bat houses, bird boxes and mobile pollinator gardens add color, texture and interest. These sprawling conservation efforts engage GM employees, community members and youth groups. In contrast, the Renaissance Center, GM’s World Headquarters, a group of seven interconnected skyscrapers in Downtown Detroit, uses tiny spaces in a hardscaped landscape to insert nature in ways that surprise. A parking deck doubles as an urban rooftop garden protected by a living wall. A bat house, a butterfly garden and other planting efforts create important oases for wildlife in an urban environment.

All cities, regardless of their economic standing, need to welcome nature back. As these conservation programs demonstrate, green growth in a gray landscape has multiple benefits for people and wildlife. In Detroit, nature is reasserting its presence, with corporate stewards giving it a helping hand and showing that no matter the size, no matter the location and no matter the corporate operation, conservation can happen.

Read more WHC blogs.

Stop Making Conservation Complicated. Just Do It.

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We all know the power of Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan. It’s simple, direct and inspiring. This campaign has been around since 1988 and “Just Do It” is now a part of our lexicon as a call to action to get things done. Its use is not limited to athletes and fitness professionals, but applicable to every challenge, however large or small, immediate or distant. It could be effective as a call to action for our planet and the restoration actions we need to take, but in the hands of the conservation community, Nike’s call to action would become, “Just Do It, but only once you’re 100% satisfied that “It” is evidence-based, that to “do” it is complex and expensive, and that having eventually done it, indicators and metrics are available to prove that it was worthwhile in the first place.” Hardly an inspiration.

Recent examples of how the conservation world engages in complexification and reinvention of the wheel include: a half-million-dollar grant to an NGO to study the value of wetlands to migratory bird species; the creation of yet another corporate collaboration to place value on ecosystems; and the launch of one more mapping platform to encourage alignments of local conservation programs. It can seem we are spending more time and money on redundant planning and frameworks instead of  implementing and just doing it.

Every day, a football field-sized area of wetlands vanishes in Louisiana. Every year, 50,000 square miles of forest are lost across the planet, and extinction permanently removes species from the world at a rate over 1,000 times that of the natural rate of extinction. Yet, we still study, we still research, we still create initiatives, collaborations and cooperatives. We have to ask ourselves, are we studying nature to death? Are we collaborating toward system collapse? Are we funding inertia over action? Are we making it more complicated than it needs to be? In an era with limited resources and limited time, are we not better off just doing it?

In the world of corporate conservation, we’ve seen, time and again, companies becoming paralyzed between research and implementation, science and management, corporate cares and operational requirements, and most importantly, between the proposed cost and the actual budget. We’ve seen programs fail to launch because of this paralysis, and have identified why and propose here, some solutions to overcome this reluctance to action.

What stops companies from just doing it:

The corporate echo chamber. Corporate sustainability roads are well-traveled, with sustainability professionals and the consultants that advise them grouping and regrouping at a small number of big conferences where success stories are shared in the language of the community of practice using performance indicators and outcome metrics. Through this sharing, a sense of conservation as theory and numbers is developed, while the action itself is often overlooked. Across the company the story is told the same way, creating a distance between operations, where the work happens, and communications, where the work gets polished and packaged for external consumption.

The gravitational pull of the big greens. Large organizations want to work with other large organizations, and in the corporate, conservation NGO and academic communities these collaborations come with large price tags that create an expectation of a sophisticated work product that outlines complex approaches to biodiversity assessment and protection but falls short at implementation. On more than one occasion, WHC has been commissioned to “translate” such products into actions that consider the real-world operating environment as well as the larger conservation context.

The resource needs of the small greens. A common stressor on small- to mid-sized NGOs is tight financial resources, driven in part by a government and philanthropic funding model that requires these groups to work with razor-thin overhead costs. These groups see potential corporate partnerships as a solution to this stress and present over-complicated, expensive proposals for work, which, having been formulated with the corporate budget in mind, fall apart once the operations budget at the site is considered. All too often WHC hears from its members about outlandish project estimates from local NGOs that result in no action being taken and trust being eroded between potential partners.

A perceived absence of knowledge. Within the conservation sciences, as within many academic disciplines there can be a tendency to forget or ignore common knowledge which leads to a sense that only the experts can plant a pollinator meadow and that only the certified and qualified can lead a reforestation project. This misperception then creates budgetary and other issues that can place a project that could be easily designed and implemented by existing resources into indefinite limbo.

But, these barriers to action can be overcome.

We need to just do it.

Corporate sustainability officers – recognize with your fellow travelers the echo chamber that you’re in, and don’t forget that people and programs tell a far better story than charts and slides.

Big green groups – continue relationships with corporate leaders. You’re driving change, but please consider setting aside a minimum of 20 percent of the program budget for implementation. If you’re going to spend $1 million to do a study with the result that you will advise a company to plant trees, set aside $200,000 to plant the trees. Philanthropic foundations should consider the same.

Small green groups – consider whether your relationship with the company is about conservation or currency. If it’s truly about conservation, be prepared for the appropriate budget. However, if what you really want is a charitable contribution to support your organization, seek it from the corporate level, not from the site.

Finally, for those at the site level who think their knowledge is not adequate to implement a conservation program on their lands, think again. There are multiple sources of information like WHC Project Guidances to help you build a strong conservation project. Remember, one of the most meaningful things you can do is to plant the right thing in the right place at the right time.

Just do it.

Read more WHC blogs.

The Kestrel and the Steel Mill – How the Urban Industrial Landscape Can Support Climate, Community and Habitats

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Last summer, while walking along the shores of Lake Michigan with WHC board members, we witnessed an American kestrel, disturbed from hunting, rise silently, up and over the lake. The board members, on a tour of a restored habitat, stopped and watched as the small raptor flew in high circles above them. That this habitat restoration project was on the grounds of an operating steel mill made the sighting all the more special. That day, the kestrel became a symbol of the potential of urban industrial landscapes to contribute to the natural world.

Urban industrial communities face many challenges – including an economic dependency on ecological resilience in the face of a changing climate – that suburban, rural or urban residential neighborhoods do not. It is in urban industrial neighborhoods that materials are manufactured, that services like trash and recycling are aggregated, and that goods are moved between terminals, rails and roads. While these neighborhoods are critical to a functioning economy, they are also at higher risk from climate change due to aging infrastructure, higher percentages of surface impermeability, little natural habitat beyond fragments, hardened shorelines, dependence on compromised water flows and urban heat island effects that results in higher-than-average ambient temperatures.

These neighborhoods, whether in small industrial towns or larger cities, are easily overlooked and are usually absent from stakeholder discussions when resiliency is being discussed and climate adaptation efforts implemented. In addition, these communities are usually underserved by private resiliency and green infrastructure efforts; philanthropic investments are directed to more pristine places that can deliver the improvement metrics required by the funders. Because the role of industry in climate change adaptation tends to be internally focused on regulations, technological improvements and environmental controls, implementation of adaptation across a fence-line and into the urban industrial landscape is rarely a priority.

But companies with businesses in these landscapes have a great opportunity to address this inequity and adapt to a changing climate. The lands and economic risk are theirs, and the ecological solution can be theirs too. With incremental, cooperative efforts, the urban industrial landscape can be transformed to create better relationships to climate and the community and support healthy habitats that buoy the return of kestrels and other species.

Ecological restoration on unused corners of industrial sites and vacant lots can, if designed with the larger conservation context in mind, provide spaces for habitats to grow and biodiversity to thrive. In a recent article published in Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, authors Elsa Anderson and Emily Minor show that vacant lots can be inexpensively restored for both ecological and sociological benefit in low-income communities.[1] Within the fence-line of an industrial facility, land originally set aside for expansion or operations can be reclaimed and restored to connect to managed landscapes nearby and provide a haven for both wildlife and workers. ArcelorMittal’s Burns Harbor steelmaking operations, where the kestrel was sighted, has set aside 120 acres for restoration, including remnants of vital Indiana Dunes habitats.

In addition to vacant lots or underused lands, another characteristic of urban industrial land use is the linear features that crisscross the landscape, connecting industrial facilities to power and transportation. These linear features, which include utility rights-of-way, railroad tracks, roads and pipelines, are all possible conservation corridors for biodiversity. These corridors provide routes for animals to move with ease through fragmented landscapes and create stepping stone habitats between the vestiges of natural areas.

A growing trend of defragmentation using linear features is in the proliferation of bee boulevards and highways increasingly being planned and planted in cities around the world. Some of these efforts, like the Pollinator Pathway program started in Seattle, takes a linear feature, like a roadway with a median green strip, and plants it with drought-tolerant native plants. Other initiatives create virtual highways, like in Oslo, Norway where bee havens on rooftops and balconies “direct” pollinator traffic across a city. Many of these efforts are in visible, affluent residential areas, but the extent of linear features in industrial zones suggests potential habitat that has not yet been realized. Such projects can also serve to connect and engage communities like Waste Management’s Bucks County Landfills in Pennsylvania (as detailed in the white paper Prioritizing Pollinators in Corporate America). This WHC-certified program partners with the local school district and the Falls Township Senior Center to design and install pollinator gardens throughout the community.

Other considerations in urban industrial landscapes include connecting conservation efforts to nearby protected areas, considering green infrastructure to better manage water flows and other environmental challenges, and using industrial lands to provide STEM education and other opportunities for conservation-related activities with the community.

In these forgotten corners of towns and cities, where economic cycles can determine an entire community’s future, opportunities exist to consider the lands through a green lens and see a place where a kestrel can soar again.

[1] Anderson, Elsa C., and Emily S. Minor. 2017. Vacant lots: An underexplored resource for ecological and social benefits in cities. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 21: 146-152.

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Food, Water and Bird Song – What Dystopian Literature Can Teach Us About Taking the Planet for Granted

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The natural environment has always had a place in literature. Sometimes as a part of the story itself, driving the plot forward and creating man-versus-nature narratives like Melville’s Moby Dick and Punke’s The Revenant. Sometimes nature is a crucial part of literary world building – an implementation of the advice to “show, don’t tell” given by every creative writing teacher. Victorian novels like Brontë’s Wuthering Heights would be much lesser stories without the atmosphere created by the surrounding natural world, in this case the weather and the windswept heath.

Nature has had a place in literature since the beginning of storytelling in works like The Epic of Gilgamesh, long recognized as the world’s oldest known epic poem, which details environmental destruction when Gilgamesh and his sidekick Enkidu destroy the cedar forest, an act of hubris that ultimately leads to their downfall. Nature exists in stories for many purposes. It is used as a metaphor in The Divine Comedy when Dante’s disorientation in the dark wood establishes the hero as a seeker of light and knowledge. It is used as a character in The Little House on the Prairie where the changes of season drive the story forward. It is used as a potent symbol in any number of tales and sagas, from ancient civilizations to today’s indigenous communities.

While all types of stories use the natural world to create narrative tension through setting and atmosphere or to act as symbols or metaphors, it is in genre fiction where nature plays a crucial and key role. In dystopian, post-apocalyptic, fantasy, speculative and science fiction novels, nature is integral as a plot device and a symbolic indicator; even through the subtlest of deployments, it has a powerful impact on the worlds the authors create and the experiences readers have.

In these genres, the environment can be the main character in the book, creating tension and drama and driving the action. In The Water Knife by Bacigalupi, the central plot centers around battles for Colorado River water rights, in a story driven by drought, interstate refugees and corrupt developers. In Herbert’s Dune, both the desert planet of Arrakis and its resident giant sand worms take on a life of their own, rewarding characters when they live in harmony and respect for nature, and punishing them when they disregard the desert’s peril and exploit the planet’s spice resources.

The environment can also be employed as a determinant of standing in a new social order, like in Lee’s On Such a Full Sea. Lee created a world in which members of the labor class are confined to urban colonies containing little to no observable nature, while the elite live in pastoral charter villages, and the rest of the population roams free in an anarchic wilderness untamed by man or government. In Saramago’s The Cave, the elite live in a centralized location that serves the functions of workspace, living space and, to meet the recreational needs of this dystopian society, commercial space. The manufacturing class, as represented by the hero Cipriano, lives beyond a bleak industrial wasteland where manufacturing of food and other goods takes place with no relation to the natural world.

In post-apocalyptic fiction, nature is typically destroyed completely or altered to such a degree that the world is unrecognizable. In this kind of world, humankind seeks refuge inside cities or structures engineered to keep them from dying, governed by new political systems that trend towards authoritarian. In the Silo series (Wool, Shift, and Dust), the self-published but critically received trilogy by Hugh Howey, the outside world is poisoned to such a degree that it is uninhabitable by humans or any other life form. The remaining population lives in silos buried deep into the earth, with a TV screen showing the bleak landscape outside the silo as a permanent reminder of the reasons for their incarcerated society.

Across more visual media, the environment is also used as shorthand. Movies like Interstellar, Avatar and Mad Max use nature and the consequences of its destruction to powerful ends. A recent TV series, Travelers, saw a group of warriors return from the future to fix the errors of the past and recreate a more livable society. The future is never seen in the show, but nature serves as a descriptor for what no longer exists in the future when the viewer observes the protagonists’ reactions to bird song (awe) and fresh food (amazement). We know that the future is not a good place if there are no birds singing and no fresh food.

Another trend in the use of nature in fiction is the corporatization of nature, removing shared benefits from the people and placing them into the hands of the powerful. Atwood’s powerful trilogy, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, speculates on what happens when genetic engineering has no ethical or legal bounds where new species are created that knock existing ecologies out of balance almost like invasive species on steroids.

All of these examples – and there are many, many more – rely on one underlying theme: when things are right, nature thrives and everyone benefits; when things are wrong, nature declines, its benefits are unequally allocated and humanity suffers accordingly.

The authors of these works are, by-and-large, not ecologists, but they know the power of nature as shorthand for health and happiness and they know that their readers, who may not be ecologists or even environmentalists, will get it too. A healthy planet with clean air, available water, fresh food and bird song should be secure enough to be taken for granted, and the alternative should only exist in the pages of dystopian stories, remaining restricted to the confines of fictional worlds.

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Securing the Standard: Next Steps for Conservation Certification

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In conservation, “adaptive management” is a term used to describe a process whereby monitoring information is used to make adjustments or corrections to actions in order to achieve desired outcomes. Many projects recognized by WHC’s Conservation Certification use adaptive management to strengthen their outcomes.

The concept of adaptive management can also be applied to systems and processes. This is exactly how we at WHC will approach the updates needed to strengthen Conservation Certification and the processes that support it. As we review the first year of applications against our new standard, we continue to embrace its original design elements while seeking a more formal approach to its development through adaptive management.

The elements that originally informed the design of Conservation Certification were drawn from best practices in voluntary sustainability standards design. These elements are:

These design elements remain foundational to Conservation Certification. Its future development will continue to be informed by these design elements, as well as by best practices in voluntary sustainability standards that are focused on adaptive management across three key areas: standard setting, compliance to the standard and impact reporting.

Early next year, we will begin to work on the foundation documents that will drive these developments. We will seek the best practices and align ourselves with standards bodies like the ISEAL Alliance to ensure that we reap the benefit of existing multi-stakeholder efforts to define certification standards that meet the needs of both business and the conservation community.

As we do that, WHC will continue to be guided by our belief that “every act of conservation matters.” We will remain accessible and recognize value in the smallest efforts while scaling up to address efforts that are site-based as well as efforts that are landscape-scale. We will remain supportive of our participants while also building a strong team of independent reviewers to ensure compliance with Conservation Certification. We will also drive change by creating a credible mechanism to report impacts through Conservation Academy webinars, Corporate Conservation Success Stories and White Papers to showcase exceptional efforts, while also using the data we collect through the Conservation Certification website to create a metrics-based assessment of corporate conservation.

As WHC continues to develop Conservation Certification, we must continue to invest in it. We must continue to invest in the technology to both support our applicants and inform the impact statements from both a site-based and landscape scale.

As we invest, we see each program becoming a natural asset account for our participants and each application review providing a statement on that account. We envision every effort contributing to a company-wide metric that integrates operations along the “stream,” across different landholdings and beyond geopolitical boundaries. We see the private sector’s impact being measured in ways that are meaningful to multiple stakeholders, both internal and external to the business. Increasingly, the rest of the world sees these opportunities too.

In other news:

From December 4th through 17th of this year, nations, academics, NGOs and the private sector will meet at the 13th Conference of the Parties (COP13) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). WHC will be there. I am speaking at the Business and Biodiversity Forum. The theme of the Forum is “Mainstreaming Biodiversity,” which calls for integrating conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in business plans, beyond corporate social responsibility strategies. The Forum is focused on the production sectors of agriculture, fisheries and forestry, but other sectors are also represented by companies, including WHC members CEMEX and General Motors.

While the CBD is a UN instrument focused on government decisions and actions, the inclusion of the private sector at COP13, represented by the number of thought leaders assembled for the Business and Biodiversity Forum and the amount of side events that contain a corporate voice, shows a growing recognition that companies have a role to play in protecting our planet’s biodiversity; that their actions need not be confined by national regulations or lack thereof, and that their conservation actions can add value to both the bottom line and the planet.

As the private sector continues to evolve in its interactions with nature and as leading companies continue to show the way and set the benchmark for biodiversity, it is critical that Conservation Certification, and the infrastructure that supports it, continues to adapt to meet members’ needs, align with contemporary conservation practices and priorities and drive change by clearly showing impact.

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SDGs and Biodiversity – The Private Sector Impact

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On a truly sustainable planet, biodiversity must thrive, populations of wildlife must not decline and extinctions must not increase beyond the natural background rate. On a truly sustainable planet, resources must be used to secure all the plants and animals that are part of life, not just those that perform functions relative to human life. All participants on the planet have the means and influence to create conservation impact, with the private sector particularly well placed to leverage their resources and expertise to restore ecosystems to health and enhance and protect biodiversity.

When the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted last year, two goals out of the 17 related directly to protecting biodiversity. SDG 14 looks at Life Below Water and SDG 15 looks at Life on Land. SDG 15, the focus of this post, is to ”protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss [sic].” The SDGs are driven by a vision of peace and prosperity for all humanity, so it’s not surprising nor materially negative that SDG 15 is focused on the ”use” potential of natural resources rather than their intrinsic value. This focus on “use” has its dangers as a recent comprehensive study of threats to biodiversity by IUCN, published in the journal Nature, clearly shows that over-exploitation and agriculture have the greatest current impact on biodiversity.

However, the inclusion of biodiversity in the SDGs is a new recognition of the importance of nature to quality of life and that healthy and sustainable human development cannot be achieved without natural resource management that prioritizes sustainability instead of unconsidered consumption.

Within each goal lies a set of targets. SDG 15 target 5 urges “urgent and significant action to reduce the degradation of natural habitats, halt the loss of biodiversity and, by 2020, protect and prevent the extinction of threatened species.” Other targets within SDG 15 address specifics of biodiversity loss like invasive species, land degradation and illegal trade in wildlife, while others present opportunities for positive action, including integrating biodiversity better into local planning and development processes and mobilizing financial resources to address biodiversity loss.

A major change from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the precursor to the SDGs, is the recognition of the interrelated nature of the issues facing this planet that require integrated solutions. This recognition is obvious in the crosscutting elements across the 17 goals and 169 targets.

To visualize these connections, PYXERA Global created a graphic, which illustrates the crosscutting elements and consolidates the goals into four focus areas, demonstrating the overlap among the various goals and illustrating their interdependent nature.

Click to enlarge.

Another change from the MDGs is the recognition that government alone cannot create the sustainable future we need. Government needs to be joined by civic society groups and business. Tri-sector partnerships are required to meet these goals. The UN has established the Business for 2030 initiative to encourage and recognize private sector involvement in the goals.

Both of these changes ― the recognition of interconnectivity and the embrace of business as a critical player in achieving these goals ― provide an opportunity for business to use the SDGs as a framework for CSR and sustainability initiatives, whether focused internally on operations or externally on community and external stakeholders. SDG 15 is an obvious starting point.

Private sector efforts in natural resource conservation are an essential contribution to SDG 15, and can also contribute to the other goals clustered in the Human and Natural Environment focus area shown in the PYXERA Global illustration above. Investments in conservation that are focused on species recovery or habitat restoration can increase overall ecosystem health which can, in turn, increase health and resiliency in cities and human settlements (SDG 11). Efforts to manage lands with nature-friendly practices and to incorporate conservation practices on legacy lands, into existing operations and into future capital projects can address SDG 9 ― building resilience into existing infrastructure and sustainability into industrialization.

The UN declaration that established these goals is ambitious. In the declaration, the parties “resolve, between now and 2030, to end poverty and hunger everywhere; to combat inequalities within and among countries; to build peaceful, just and inclusive societies; to protect human rights and promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls; and to ensure the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources.” The declaration is framed as a collective journey in which there are roles and responsibilities for all.

Every business has an impact on land, ecosystems and habitats. Some sectors, like the extractive industry sector, have a direct and visible impact, while others, like the manufacturing sector, have an indirect and less visible impact, with the services sector even further removed from direct impact.  Across industry sectors, different businesses have different impacts on biodiversity, but all business has an impact. It is this commonality that should impel all businesses, not just those with direct impacts, to consider their lands, their communities and their opportunities to make a difference in this arena and adopt SDG 15 and associated goals as their own.

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Taking Nature Out of the Corner and Into the Spotlight: Biodiversity and the Circular Economy

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In the now classic movie, Dirty Dancing, the final scene starts with everybody’s favorite movie line, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner!” This iconic line comes to mind every time I see an infographic explaining the circular economy, but the “Baby” in this case happens to be nature, expelled from the closed loop although materially impacted by it.

Circular economy or closed loop systems are, depending on who you ask, merely grandiloquent terms for recycling or the next best thing to address the impact of industrial processes on the planet. The Ellen Macarthur Foundation, one of the leading voices on circularity, presents the various schools of thought on the concept with a diversity of approaches to circularity, some of which are more transactional than others.

William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle manifesto is one of the few to address nature and its needs as an integral part of the system, beyond being just an ingredient within the system. His circular model calls for respecting biodiversity as a value rather than an input. This respect for biodiversity is contained within McDonough’s ethos of a respect for diversity in all of its forms. In contrast, the concept of biomimicry views nature as a commodity, providing its biology, chemistry and engineering to solve human problems.

Circular economy approaches are very valuable at driving innovation in manufacturing processes, waste management and consumption patterns. Removing waste from industrial and consumption cycles, reducing materials used to make goods, and encouraging cascading benefits of by-products are all positive steps toward decreasing our collective weight on the planet and increasing the life of our natural resources.

But this approach shares many of the same weaknesses with respect to nature that natural capital accounting, ecosystem service valuation, and other economy-first initiatives share ― they all put biodiversity in the corner to the detriment of all life on the planet.

As McDonough says in Cradle to Cradle, “When diversity is nature’s design framework, human design solutions that do not respect it degrade the ecological and cultural fabric of our lives.” It doesn’t have to be this way.  It’s just the easier to extract a process and close it than attempt to interweave processes the way nature does in the ultimate closed loop that is planet Earth.

One environmental thought leader who expressed the need to integrate biodiversity loss into environmental impact assessments and to think about species beyond their use as resources is Pope Francis, writing in Laudato Si, a document released by the Vatican in June 2015. Although this papal encyclical has been politically reduced to a plea for action on climate change, the Pope covers a broad variety of environmental issues and says that “a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly. We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.” He’s not just talking circular economy in this passage, but he certainly highlights the shortcomings of a closed loop process that ignores the thing on which it sits.

There are many things that industry can do to address its impact on nature and embrace the restorative imperatives contained within circular economy models. Where impacts are direct ― like on lands used for extraction ― approaches to land management during operations and design of reclamation and restoration can focus on exceeding regulatory requirements to provide maximum benefit for biodiversity. At its Marblehead Quarry in Ohio, LafargeHolcim is actively managing for the recovery of the rare and endangered lakeside daisy by using crushed limestone screenings to create the alkaline conditions required by the plant, whose only known occurrence in the state is in Ottawa County where the quarry is located.

Across all industrial sectors, non-operational lands can be managed to respect biodiversity and restore nature, rather than managed in ways that limit its exuberance  such as through frequent mowing or landscaping with non-native species. By including the entire industrial footprint in the closed loop, a circular process can have a significant restorative impact on biodiversity. WHC’s recent white paper, Prioritizing Pollinators in Corporate America, shows how easily an entire footprint can be utilized for positive outcomes that meet a national need.

No loop is fully closed or sealed off. Every process contains manufactured goods and the ingredients that make them – all must be moved across the globe, and these movements create pathways for the spread of invasive species and wildlife diseases. By including product movement in the closed loop, operations along the manufacturing process, from extraction all the way to retail, can have an impact on two of the greatest threats to biodiversity worldwide.

Finally, the needs of biodiversity can be considered in the cascades, or by-products of a closed system.  General Motors set – and already surpassed – a global goal to achieve 100 landfill-free facilities by 2020. They are creating circularity in their manufacturing processes in many ways. The company also has a biodiversity goal that all of its manufacturing facilities worldwide secure WHC Conservation Certification by 2020. These goals became intertwined when GM started to convert scrap Chevy Volt battery covers into nesting boxes for wildlife, cascading a product to benefit biodiversity.

Whether it’s called circular economy, regenerative design, cradle to cradle manufacturing or any other fancy word for recycling, it’s not necessary that these waste elimination and resource-use reduction processes and approaches be laminated onto nature. They in fact can include nature in many ways and fully embrace the restorative imperative. We just need to open the closed loop and take biodiversity out of the corner.

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