Intro of Biodiversity

Trends and Importance of Biodiversity Issues

Corporate operations depend on natural resources and ecosystem services—collectively referred to as natural capital. The Natural Capital Protocol clearly underscores the importance of biodiversity to the health and stability of natural capital¹. For example, rich biodiversity can help mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, accelerate ecosystem recovery, and support fundamental processes such as carbon cycling, water cycling, and soil formation. Thus, biodiversity is not only an integral part of natural capital but also the very foundation of ecosystem services.

At the United Nations Earth Summit in 1992, the United Nations adopted the Convention on Biological Diversity and established three principal biodiversity objectives: conserving biodiversity by protecting rare species and ecological environments; valuing and encouraging the sustainable use of biodiversity resources by using natural resources responsibly without damaging ecosystems; and ensuring the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources by distributing the benefits derived from the development of natural resources, such as medicinal plants and genetic resources, fairly among the relevant countries and communities. Unfortunately, the absence of specific standards and detailed implementation rules led to considerable differences in practice among countries, while the global natural environment and biodiversity continued to deteriorate. 

At the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (CBD COP15), held in Montreal, Canada, in 2022, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted to establish key pathways and targets for biodiversity action through 2030. The framework sets a clear target to ensure that, by 2030, at least 30% of degraded terrestrial, inland water, marine, and coastal ecosystems are under effective restoration in order to enhance biodiversity, ecosystem functions and services, ecological integrity, and connectivity.2 It also calls on companies to regularly monitor species richness and environmental quality so that they can assess and address biodiversity risks and thereby reduce impacts on their operations.

According to the Nexus Assessment released by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), climate, nature (biodiversity), water, food, and health are major, interrelated factors. The assessment also confirms that nature loss has translated into tangible economic and survival costs: global species richness is declining by 2-6% per decade; more than half of the world’s population lives in areas where water, food, and climate risks overlap; and the annual global financing gap for nature conservation is as high as USD 700 billion. If nature-related risks continue to be overlooked, the losses to food systems and health caused by ecosystem collapse worldwide will far exceed the investment currently required for nature restoration and sustainable transition.