The Brazilian Business Council for Sustainable Development launches, this Tuesday (16), the publication “How are Companies Contributing to the Global Biodiversity Goals?”, which aims to understand the efforts and contributions of Brazilian companies to reduce direct pressures and increase biodiversity conservation through business, mapping the current state of management of the issue and the establishment of goals by the private sector.
The result of a partnership with CDP, the study gathers information on 28 companies associated with CEBDS, reported through an online questionnaire and access to public information databases, which provides a portrait of the profile and policies of companies in relation to biodiversity conservation. The report also shows the main challenges faced by companies in relation to difficulties in measuring and monetizing impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Of the sample studied, 92% adopt corporate policies that include issues related to biodiversity, and to manage the negative impacts mapped in the study, 75% of these companies adopt actions to recover or protect areas, and 75% carry out periodic monitoring of fauna or flora. The majority (77%) reported having assumed some public commitment or goal related to biodiversity.
Regarding the recovery of degraded areas, over the last five years, the companies' actions have resulted in more than 300 thousand hectares of areas undergoing recovery. The areas protected by the companies total more than 15 million hectares, the majority in the Cerrado and Atlantic Forest biomes.
The report also highlights the companies' concern with their supply chains: 80% adopt actions within their value chains to improve their environmental performance, and 67% develop actions aimed at the end consumer aiming at the sustainable consumption of their products or services.
The data will be presented at the online event “Embedding nature into business models: success histories”, organized by the Global Partnership for Business and Biodiversity (GPBB/CDB). CEBDS technical advisor Henrique Luz will represent CEBDS and the Brazilian Business and Biodiversity Initiative (IBNBio), alongside Letícia Guimarães, co-leader of CT Bio.
The topic of biodiversity will be one of the major issues on the socio-environmental agenda for 2021, especially due to the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) being held in the city of Kunming, in Yunnan province, China, from May 17 to 30.
The meeting, which was scheduled to take place last year and was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is important for a number of reasons. It will help forge a new global agreement for biodiversity conservation, sustainable use of natural resources and fair and equitable benefit sharing, with long-term aspirations. This new milestone will be as important for biodiversity as the 2015 Paris Agreement was for climate change.
