Biodiversity bubbled up as an important — if still overlooked — issue for businesses during 2021. And sustainability professionals can anticipate the emergence of important new resources for that agenda to emerge during the months ahead.

“I think we’ll look back on [last] year and see it as a positive tipping point at which business and finance really came to understand the critical importance of nature-related risk,” observed Tony Goldner, the executive director of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), a working group of 35 financial and climate members whose mission is to develop risk management frameworks for climate change.

Elodie Chene, manager of standards at the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), saw biodiversity loss creep to the top of the agenda of many businesses in 2021. From increased disclosures related to nature  to a focus on nature-protecting projects, businesses grappled with how to move beyond commitments centered primarily on reducing carbon dioxide emissions to initiatives that address ecosystem destruction and other  nuanced issues related to climate change.

While corporate climate agendas are inherently interconnected, setting biodiversity goals requires different considerations than calculating carbon reduction targets. And it will also require different reporting methodologies. And according to Chene, less than 25 percent of large companies at risk from biodiversity loss are disclosing their impacts.

“The nature agenda is different from climate emissions,” Goldner said. “[With carbon], one company contributes to a global problem, whereas nature-related impacts are local. We have to think about the issues in a slightly different way.”

The resources, verifications and guidelines around biodiversity are much less mature than those surrounding climate. But updates are coming. Here are five organizations and collaborative efforts working on biodiversity disclosure frameworks and strategy guidelines coming in 2022 to watch closely.

  1.  GRI and the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group
  2. The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures 
  3. One Planet: Business for Biodiversity
  4. CDP 
  5. Convention on Biological Diversity

Read the full article about biodiversity by Jesse Klein at GreenBiz.