Why Clients Care?
Reputation
Customers and stakeholders demand organisations to take responsibility for their impacts on nature. Contributing positively to nature improves reputation, customer appeal and creates social value.
Regulatory and Legal Risks
Regulators are increasingly expecting organisations to contribute positively to nature. Not appropriately considering and managing nature exposes organisations and their directors to significant legal risks (see also bottom right-handed box).
Access to Investment
Nature-related considerations and disclosure are becoming increasing priorities for investors assessing long-term viability and risk.
Resource Dependency
Many industries directly rely on healthy ecosystems for raw materials and ecosystem services. Nature loss threatens the sustainability of these resources and therefore whole industries.
Market Opportunities
Emerging nature-related markets such as for biodiversity units, carbon credits, flood risk and water quality regulation provide new income opportunities.
Climate Mitigation
Nature has an elemental role in achieving climate-related targets. Woodland creation and peatland restoration offer unique opportunities to offset unavoidable operational carbon emissions.
Climate Adaptation
Climate change is happening, and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) often provide a cost-effective solution to protecting assets from climate impacts such as flooding and heat waves.
“Businesses, large or small, have an impact both positive and negative, and a dependency on biodiversity. While the impact and dependencies vary from company to company, sector to sector, biodiversity is core to business activities, value chain and reputation.”
“A new legal opinion has concluded that directors in England and Wales could be exposed to liability for failing to have regard to nature-related risks.”
The opinion assesses the relevance of nature-related risks to three areas of directors’ duties (duty to promote success, duty to act with reasonable care, skill and diligence, and disclosure duties) under the UK Companies Act 2006.