Consultant's Column #1

Biodiversity Risks Wait for No One: Conservation Initiatives Are Every Company's Responsibility to Future Generations

12 years have passed since the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP10) in Aichi Prefecture in 2010. Regarding progress toward achieving the Aichi Targets that were set on that occasion, the Japanese government has reported that 5 out of 20 individual targets have been "achieved," while 8 are "in progress but not achieved." Meanwhile, the UN has summarized the situation by saying that "Although considerable progress can be seen across the world, there is no place where all 20 targets have been achieved. The targets and levels of individual countries do not necessarily align with the Aichi Targets." Overall, this is an unfortunate outcome.

According to the UN's 2019 summary, global biodiversity remains in a critical state. 40% of amphibians, 34% of plants, 33% of corals, 31% of sharks, rays, and other chondrichthyes, 27% of insects, 25% of mammals, and 14% of birds are at risk of extinction. Compared climate change, to which responses have been accelerating worldwide since the Paris Agreement (2015), the situation with biodiversity has definitely stagnated. Yet, the loss of biodiversity is more critical than climate change. According to an awareness survey by the Cabinet Office in 2022, only 29% "know the meaning of the word biodiversity." Moreover, Dr Giovanni Strona, a professor at the University of Helsinki and a researcher of the European Commission, has produced shocking results by recreating and simulating real-world living species and food chains with a supercomputer. A quarter of the planet's biodiversity is expected to disappear within the next century as the world is heading toward a sixth mass extinction.

It was amid such developments that the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) convened in Montreal, Canada in December 2022. It was held two years late due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main theme this was to decide on the Post-2020 Framework to succeed the Aichi Targets. Despite many difficulties in the discussions, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted. It consists of 23 individual targets, of which the most important include ▽The "30by30 target" of protecting and conserving at least 30% of both land and sea by 2030, ▽Promoting business impact assessment and information disclosure, ▽Measures against invasive species, and ▽Minimizing the impacts of climate change on biodiversity.

At present in Japan, national parks and other protected areas make up 20% of land and 13% of sea, neither reaching 30%, but an OECM is being prepared to classify areas as equivalent to protected areas as long as they contribute to the preservation of biodiversity. If this is used to preserve biodiversity, woods, biotopes, green areas of factories and offices, well-maintained woodlands, golf courses, and other locations owned by private organizations and companies may become protected areas.

Japanese companies are currently investing in climate change efforts, and information disclosures through Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) will become regularized in 2023. Professor Yasuhiro Kubota at the University of the Ryukyus, in a collaborative research project with Think Nature, a startup that he himself set up to promote biodiversity, has concluded that effectively expanding the protected areas to 30% of Japan's land area would reduce the relative extinction risk of flora and fauna by 70%, meaning that the 30by30 target is scientifically effective.

The 30by30 Alliance for Biodiversity launched by the Ministry of the Environment in 2022 is currently endorsed by 116 companies, municipalities, and others. I believe it can finally be said that the conditions are right for companies to really work for biodiversity. If things continue like this, criticism along the lines of "What on earth were the adults doing back then?" will be unavoidable from the 22th-century generations that are likely to bear witness to the extinction of thousands of animals and plants. Companies need to recognize the "biodiversity crisis" as something for which they have a responsibility for the future, making the same efforts as with climate change.