It's Time to Tell the Truth About Nature

by Zoe Balmforth , Co-founder of Pivotal Future

We all know the (double) jeopardy: nature and climate are dual, intertwined, looming crises. Net zero depends on nature. Everything we have depends on nature. The diversity of the natural world – our planet’s biodiversity – underpins everything from the provision of our food and water to the regulation of Earth’s climate. The idea that we can solve the climate crisis without at the same time addressing biodiversity loss is like thinking we can stop a nuclear meltdown without putting out the fire in the reactor core.?

As a society, we’ve known for many decades how much biodiversity matters and yet have struggled to find the tools and ideas to stop ourselves from destroying it. To date, the world has failed every single major target ever set with the aim of halting nature loss. Global wildlife populations have fallen by 69% since 1970, largely because of loss of habitat: we have significantly altered 75% of the Earth’s land surface , impacted 66% of the ocean, and destroyed 85% of wetlands. In the last 3 decades alone, 420 million hectares of forest have been lost to land clearance and logging. The financing required to return global ecosystems to health is around $800 billion more than is currently being spent – per year.?

One thing is clear - understanding the jeopardy isn’t enough. We can all agree something needs to change, but if we want change to actually happen we have to stop thinking in terms of an impending (but timeline-less) doom. We must instead start to think in terms of optimistic action that delivers solutions. For example, what tangible action would make a chocolate bar something positive for people and the planet, instead of something that comes at the expense of a beautiful West African forest and the wildlife and communities it once supported? The good news is that there are finally (some) signs of a shift towards action.

Signs of change

Nature is moving up the agenda fast. Those of us who once spent significant portions of our lives crafting narratives around the ‘business case for nature’ (trying to persuade businesses to care about it) now find that’s much less needed. Conversations with the private sector are now more likely to start with ‘tell me how’ than ‘persuade me why’. More big corporates are spending money on developing a nature strategy than would have been imaginable just a few years ago (Salesforce and Holcim are just two examples). Meanwhile, the ‘nature tech’ sector has become a nascent investment category in its own right, as interest in the potential for growth and innovation in nature markets blossoms. Within the finance sector, there is an increasing understanding of the existential stability risks that stem from the entangled planetary crises and of nature’s underpinning role in mitigating those risks. As that understanding spreads, the intersection between different sustainability issues has become a mainstream topic among impact investors.?

Perhaps because of this increasing awareness, there’s a trend to expect private sector organisations to provide more information on how they impact the natural world. Nature-related disclosures are one example. There is increasing pressure on businesses and financial institutions to disclose how much they impact (and depend on) nature, how that translates into financial risk, and what they plan to do about it. And there’s a growing expectation that those disclosures should be audited and verified as true.?

A bunch of new regulations and voluntary standards are emerging, including the EU’s new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the voluntary Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) . Some frameworks are already reasonably ambitious (at least by historical standards). For example, some expect businesses to quantify the impacts of their supply chains – meaning they need to work out not only how much nature has been destroyed by their factories but also how much is/was lost during the production of all the ingredients that go into those factories. And there’s an expectation that companies will start to trace their supply chains - to locate the fields, oceans, forests and mines that produce the commodities they source, and better understand what species and habitats were harmed by that production. For big companies with complex global sourcing, that’s a big ask and a decent step forward toward identifying the nature loss that’s embedded into the products we buy and use.

Translating expectations into outcomes

Disclosures represent important progress because they should create pressure to change. If brands, suppliers, companies (and politicians?) are expected to tell us how they’re impacting nature and what they plan to do about it, that should in theory push them to do good things that they can report on.?

But there’s a risk this inflection into positive, on-the-ground action doesn’t materialise – that disclosure remains a ‘paper-based’ exercise that doesn’t lead to recovery in forests, grasslands, wetlands and rivers, full of beautiful, healthy plants and wildlife, providing stability to the natural ecosystems we rely on. One risk is that there are no consequences for a ‘bad’ disclosure (perhaps one showing major negative impacts with no plans to mitigate them). But there’s also a significant risk that no one can discern which disclosures are true and which are false.?

The burden of proof

If we want to really change the game for nature, we have to know the truth about what’s happening to it. That means those disclosing their impacts must be required to measure them properly and report on them truthfully. In turn, that means we need data on the state of nature and how it’s changing.?

Life on Earth exists in a series of systems (literally, ecosystems) that are vastly more than the sum of their individual parts. They are deeply complex webs of biological, chemical and physical interconnections and interdependencies that we still, after centuries of research, don’t fully understand. The answer to the question ‘how much biodiversity was lost?’ is more complicated than simply ‘how many species disappeared?’ or ‘how much less greenness can we see from space?’. It’s more like ‘how much less diverse are all the components of life in this system, and how much less resilient is it to disturbance or shock?’.?

This natural complexity makes it impossible to accurately model or predict how nature will respond to an action or impact. Yet, the norm is to try to do exactly that. You could take the same action (planting trees, say) in different places, at different times, in slightly different ways, and see multiple, totally different outcomes. We can’t expect to be able to accurately model, predict or extrapolate the state of nature or how it will change. To know the truth about nature, we have to measure it. That means we need on-the-ground data, analysed in the context of ecosystems, landscapes and human activities, that tells us how biodiversity is changing over time. Whether the habitats, birds, insects, mammals, frogs and ecosystem functions on a company’s sites, farms or forests are changing for the better or for the worse, for example.?

It's been historically very difficult, time-consuming and expensive to gather and analyse that kind of nature data because it required teams of (expensive) expert ecologists to go into the field and manually collect it, and then manually, painstakingly process and analyse it. So it makes sense that this hasn’t generally been done very well (or at all). But thankfully times have changed – measuring on-the-ground changes in biodiversity is now eminently possible and affordable, which means we can now expect much better from those making claims about their impacts. Technology is simplifying both the ground-based measurement of biodiversity and the analysis of the resulting data. Some of the most accurate methods for measuring and analysing real, on-the-ground change in the natural world are now also the least expensive, and it’s no longer justifiable to rely on coarse estimates. Impacts on nature now can and should be properly measured and quantified.

Anything less than the whole, granular truth runs huge risks of nature-washing, of misplaced action, and opportunity lost. We must insist on minimum standards of proof, so those making claims about nature are telling the truth about the outcomes they achieved. That means requiring claims to be audited. And it means not accepting estimates, proxy data or extrapolations, especially where accuracy is untested, biases are unknown, and obfuscation is all too possible.

TNFD has already come under fire for being too soft on business. While it’s arguable that rushing to criticise something so new might be jumping the gun, it’s a signal that stakeholders are losing patience with soft promises, obfuscation, greenwashing, and lack of tangible, evidenced outcomes. At the same time, EU regulators are moving to tighten the rules on sustainability claims and ESG ratings . These are indicators of a general trend toward a growing burden of proof on businesses.

So next time you wonder whether the cinnamon in your swirl cost a piece of rainforest, and all of the rivers, birds, insects, frogs and mammals it once supported, consider what proof you’d want to see if someone told you it didn’t.?

*This article was originally published on MCJ's Substack