Companies like to talk about having a positive impact on nature. However, as Marco Daldoss Pirri explains, the first global science-based targets for nature enable them to act at a meaningful speed and scale.
With more than half of global GDP at risk from nature loss, the business case for addressing the nature and climate crises should be overwhelming. Much of the corporate world’s response has been anything but. Among the grounds for hope is the Science Based Targets initiative; since 2015, over 2,600 companies have set SBTi climate targets.
The Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) is now seeking to set standards for corporate action on nature – across freshwater, land, ocean, biodiversity and climate. A ’first adopter’ group of 17 companies will set the first targets for nature this year, as part of the SBTN Initial Target Validation Pilot.
“Obviously, in an ideal world, we would not need targets at all”, says Marco. “But companies – and other stakeholders too, such as financial institutions and civil society organisations – are now demanding targets. They want to understand what and how much they need to do to ensure the resilience and recovery of nature, and how quickly they need to act. They want a level playing field and a simple, powerful way to communicate their commitments and actions.”
There’s some evidence for that wider demand in the 200 companies and organizations that have helped shape the initial methods, tools and guidance, representing input from over 20 sectors in 25 countries.
How does Systemiq support the new targets?
SBTN’s Land Hub is a collaboration between the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, the World Resources Institute, and the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU). It is responsible for developing the technical content of land-systems targets to sustain nature and people. Systemiq is the Hub’s primary consultant partner, and leads the development of this version of the targets.
The guidance is built on targets that are relevant for any company that has material impacts on nature, through their impact on land use or change and through the management of land linked to their operations or upstream supply chain. Depending on their material impact, sector, size and other factors, companies that are in – or source from – a range of sectors can set land targets including food, beverage and agriculture, forestry, fishing and aquaculture, bioenergy, mining, infrastructure and construction.
There are three complementary and linked SBTN land targets:
• Target 1 – No Conversion of Natural Ecosystems. This targets aims at avoiding the loss of nature in land systems by addressing land conversion— the dominant driver of terrestrial biodiversity loss.
• Target 2 – Land Footprint Reduction. This target’s objective is to reduce the land use pressure of large agricultural areas, whose expansion and ongoing impact has far exceeded the resilient capacity of the natural ecosystems on which these human systems rely.
• Target 3 – Landscape Engagement. This target aims at stimulating company action and effort in the context of collaborative multi-stakeholder processes at the landscape scale: to regenerate working lands, restore degraded or converted ecosystems, and transform the ways that a company acts in, and sources from, landscapes.
But is there a danger that target-setting will attract only a minority of companies – and mainly those already committed to a nature-positive approach?
That doubt should disappear, Marco suggests, once other companies see who those first adopters are: “They span across sectors and across stages of the value chains – they are some of the most massive multinationals out there.”
The targets are also aligned with some of the existing leading initiatives (such as the Accountability Framework, GHG Protocol, Science Based Target initiative – Forests, Land and Agriculture, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, Convention on Biological Diversity) and formal legislation, including the EU Deforestation Law.
Ultimately, the case is simple. Corporate pledges are easily made, but the science behind the targets is the key to their integrity. Marco puts himself in the position of those early-adopting CEOs: “They want to show that they are ahead of the competition, that they are contributing to a nature- positive future, and this will attract finance. ‘We are aligned with science-based targets for nature’ is a simple sentence that already communicates so much.”
What is the timeline for companies?
The first adopter companies will be undertaking methods to assess and prioritise their impact, before preparing targets to be submitted to the SBTN for validation in 2023. SBTN is calling on all companies to start assessing and prioritising their environmental impacts using its technical methodologies.
Depending on their material impacts, companies will be able to submit freshwater and land targets for validation in 2024. Find out more from SBTN.
