What does Nature Positive mean for business and government?
Image: Jaana Dielenberg.
News story
9 October 2024
Thousands of people are meeting in Sydney this week for a Global Nature Positive Summit, hosted by the Australian and New South Wales Governments, but what does nature positive even mean?
A new report by the Biodiversity Council sets out the key things that businesses, local, state and federal governments need to know about nature positive and how they can help drive positive changes for a more sustainable future.
Biodiversity Council Policy and Innovation Lead Lis Ashby said that, “Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse has been ranked as the third highest threat humanity will face in the next 10 years by the World Economic Forum.
“Nature — such as healthy vegetation, soils and ecosystems — is also the only viable large-scale carbon sink on the planet, so the on-going destruction of nature is also exacerbating the climate crisis.
“Governments and businesses are increasingly adopting nature positive as an ambitious goal to address both the biodiversity crisis and climate crisis, as the two are intertwined.
“The goal of Nature Positive is to halt biodiversity loss by 2030 and to then increase and recover nature by 2050.
“The ways of the past have caused this rapid decline of biodiversity and business as usual will continue the loss. Turning things around requires transformative change and sustained effort from government, business, and the community.
“This is new territory for everyone so we produced this report to help businesses and all levels of government to make this transition.
“Key among the actions for businesses is to undertake steps to understand and report on their impacts and dependencies on nature. They can then work to take action to reduce the harm they may be doing to nature, directly or through their supply chains.
“To drive systemic change, businesses can also advocate for nature across their sphere of influence and drive sector-wide approaches that reward nature leaders and encourage a ‘race to the top’.
“For governments, the obligations are clear. They need to implement all the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework which Australia signed up to in 2022.
The trajectory of nature positive by 2030. It recognizes some ongoing loss is unavoidable given current trends and identifies the goal of a net improvement to a nature positive condition by 2030 (from a 2020 baseline) and full recovery by 2050. Only the green trajectory line could be considered nature positive. (Source: WWF)
“One of the requirements under the framework is to stop policies and government subsidies that are harming nature. We’ve identified that the Australian Government spends $26 billion per year incentivising activities that potentially harm nature.
“The funding could be reallocated to meet one of the other requirements, which is a significant and sustained increase in funding to recover nature.
“Governments must also empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to Care for Country and do more to ensure all voices are heard in decision-making.
“Finally the Australian Government needs to reform our broken biodiversity conservation laws so that they work to stop nature loss.”
