Companies are failing to act on the loss of nature despite knowing for years that it threatens their supply chains and profits, the head of the UN’s biodiversity body has said.
Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, told Reuters that while some firms were closely engaged, many remained “on the sidelines” as governments prepare for a summit that will review targets the UN’s own draft report says are almost all being missed.
“Companies are not investing enough time and energy and resources into analysing their biodiversity impacts and dependencies and risk along the supply chain,” she said, speaking before preparatory talks in Nairobi this week.
Biodiversity loss has appeared among the World Economic Forum’s top global risks every year since 2020, a list drawn from surveys of business leaders and used widely in corporate planning.
“The paradox is that biodiversity and nature risk has been amongst the top risks for the past five or six years,” Ms Schomaker told Reuters.
“So in a way they are aware that there’s a risk, but companies are not yet acting on it.”
She said the delay was due to practical and financial obstacles, with firms slow to assess their exposure while governments are slow to require them to disclose it.
Nature risk remains harder to measure than carbon emissions because it is specific to place, so a company’s exposure depends on which river, forest or fishery its operations and suppliers depend on rather than on a single global figure.
The Armenia summit, the 17th meeting of the parties to the convention, will carry out the first full review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the agreement struck in Montreal in 2022 under which almost every country committed to protect 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030, restore damaged ecosystems and cut subsidies that harm nature.
Every country in the world is party to the convention except the United States and the Holy See.
A draft of the UN’s own global report on progress, published last week, found countries falling short on 22 of the framework’s 23 targets and warned that the goal of halting and reversing nature loss by 2030 would not be met unless action accelerated rapidly.
The draft has been through peer review and will be edited before publication ahead of the summit.
One target has already passed. Countries were meant to identify all their subsidies that damage nature by 2025, as the first step towards cutting $500bn of them a year by 2030.
Analysis by Carbon Brief of 134 national reports found that 21 countries appear to have done so, about 16 per cent of those that have reported, while 62 countries have not submitted a report at all.
The subsidies those countries did identify came to about $270bn a year, nearly half of it going to fossil fuels.