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The loss of nature poses a direct threat to half of the global economy. The rapid decline in biodiversity should raise concerns among many Australian businesses reliant on nature, particularly in sectors such as agriculture, tourism, construction, and food manufacturing. However, considerations regarding nature are frequently overlooked in business decision-making.

At this week’s Global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney, scientists, politicians, conservationists, and business leaders have come together to discuss strategies for enhancing nature in Australia. The focus is not only on safeguarding it from harm but also on improving it. Engaging more businesses in nature conservation and encouraging proactive measures are essential themes of these discussions.

To reduce a business's environmental impact, the first step is to measure that impact. While it may appear to be a daunting task due to the complexity of nature and its diverse interconnectedness, quantifying a business's interaction with the environment doesn’t have to be overly complicated.

Uncovering Impacts on Nature

The fishing industry relies directly on healthy stocks of wild fish. Similarly, a housing developer has a clear impact on nature when clearing natural vegetation to construct a new suburb.

However, businesses can also interact with nature indirectly. For instance, a margarine producer sourcing canola oil from a grower that depends on bees for pollination exemplifies this connection. Builders might inadvertently harm rainforests in Indonesia by purchasing timber from that region. Even a superannuation company that invests in such a developer contributes to this indirect negative impact.

Starting next year, Australian companies will be required to measure and report their climate impacts. While businesses currently are not mandated to disclose their broader impacts on nature, many are taking steps in that direction, both in Australia and globally.

In 2022, over 400 of the world's largest corporations called for mandatory disclosure of nature impacts, including well-known names like Nestlé, Rio Tinto, L'Oréal, Sony, and Volvo. Additionally, numerous early-adopter businesses have begun voluntarily disclosing their nature impacts.

Guidelines exist to assist companies in understanding and measuring their impacts, yet progress has been slow. This is partly due to a perception among businesses that the task is overly complex.

Assessing nature's impact poses significant challenges. Unlike quantifying a company’s contributions to climate change—by measuring the tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions—there is no universally accepted metric for impacts on nature.

Furthermore, different individuals assign varying values to different aspects of nature. For instance, most people would likely value a koala more than a mosquito, regardless of the ecological roles both play.

Drawing on the Expertise of Ecologists

Despite the challenges, assessing the extent to which a business impacts the environment is achievable through three essential steps:

1. Understanding Broad Intersections with Nature: Businesses must first grasp how their operations broadly interact with the natural world.

2. Evaluating Specific Activities: The next step involves analyzing how particular business activities intersect with and exert pressure on nature.

3. Measuring and Reporting Impacts: Finally, businesses need to measure and report on how these specific activities affect the condition of nature, determining whether the status of animals, plants, and ecosystems is improving or declining.

Online tools such as ENCORE can help businesses initiate the first step by providing insights into their broad impacts and dependencies on nature.

Many organizations are advancing to the second stage, where they evaluate the specific activities that exert pressure on the environment and identify their reliance on various ecosystem services.

The pressure a business imposes on nature can be quantified using specific metrics, including water consumption, air pollutants emitted, waste generated, or land area altered. A range of online tools and metrics is available to assist with this evaluation.

The next step, while more complex, is crucial. It involves businesses directly measuring their impacts on specific species, plants, and ecosystems. Here, the expertise of ecologists becomes invaluable.

Counting individual members of a species can be challenging, and assessing extinction risk is often complicated. Therefore, ecologists typically monitor a species’ habitat—the environments necessary for a species’ survival and reproduction—as a proxy for the species' overall fate.

Ecosystems, such as rainforests, wetlands, or deserts, can be classified as being in good or poor condition. This classification depends on whether all the ecosystem’s plants, animals, and other components are present, or whether invasive species or unwanted elements, like weeds, are prevalent.

In addition, maps illustrating ecosystem conditions and extents are readily available for much of Australia. Habitat mapping is accessible for most threatened species, as well as thousands of other organisms. Mapping resources also cover World Heritage sites, significant wetlands, national parks, Indigenous Protected Areas, and various other environmental types.

These resources are relatively easy and inexpensive to access, and the number of individuals and organizations skilled in interpreting and utilizing such data is steadily increasing.

Some businesses are already taking steps to conduct these measurements. For instance, the plantation forestry company Forico prepared a natural capital report last year that included a range of nature metrics, such as the extent of species habitats and assessments of vegetation condition.

However, many businesses have yet to engage with this more in-depth analysis of nature.

Looking Ahead

We have the necessary information and metrics to assist businesses in measuring their impact on nature.

Urgent collaboration between businesses and nature experts is essential to ensure that available data is tailored to meet the specific needs of companies and presented in a usable format.

Governments can play a supportive role by creating accessible and practical online data platforms and funding training programs for more nature experts who understand business dynamics.

The newly established federal agency, Environment Information Australia, is expected to become a crucial hub for data and information.

By measuring what may initially seem immeasurable, businesses can contribute to addressing the nature crisis. There is reason for optimism—but we must act swiftly.