💫 Biodiversity loss action: 4 key points you need to know

This is the monthly newsletter from Bemari where we talk about how to not get lost in sustainability.

This month is dedicated to biodiversity - 22 May was the International Day for Biodiversity, 20th May was the World Bee Day, and a lot of discussions have been taking place around this topic and the importance of businesses taking action.

Here are 4 key points you need to know:

1. Climate and biodiversity are interdependent. If you address biodiversity loss, it will have a positive effect on climate. The reverse is not always true - some climate solutions can hard biodiversity e.g. plastic is lower in carbon but causes pollution of water, soil and air thereby affecting biodiversity, afforestation with carbon focus can lead to mono-cultures being planted that are damaging to biodiversity. Climate solutions and biodiversity loss need to be tackled in tandem to ensure no negative impacts on other planetary boundaries.

2. You can start taking actions against biodiversity loss with the information you already have. Use this tool to consider your business activities, products, locations and processes to identify where your business may have impacts on biodiversity.

3. We already have the solutions we need to address climate change and biodiversity - we don’t need to rely on unproven technologies, we just need to scale what we already know works: electrification, renewables, energy efficiency measures, phasing out of fossil fuels, reduction in deforestation and increase in carbon sequestration measures. All these measures are critical and relevant for a business, as well as at a policy level. See if you can get the world to under 1.5 using this simulation tool. 

4. Two levers of change that do not get enough attention:

   • reducing highly potent gasses such as methane and nitrous oxide FAST: these are critical and need to be called out separately to carbon as they stay around for less time but do more damage in terms of heating up the atmosphere quicker. This means action on agricultural land use, wastewater treatment, food waste and farming activities. Do you know where your greenhouse gas hotspots are outside of carbon?

   • carbon pricing is an essential ingredient of climate change and protection of biodiversity solutions recipe - without carbon pricing the markets and consumption patterns cannot change. If the incentive systems support old priorities, new changes cannot take hold. Have you implemented internal carbon pricing within your business?

For your toolkit

• Ready to step up your biodiversity impacts assessment? LEAP framework will help you dig a little deeper

• Science Based Targets for Nature (SBTN) have released initial guidance for business on setting Nature targets

• Need something visual to help get your stakeholders onboard? This video from David Attenborough should help. For those driven by numbers, try these stats.

If you don’t want to do this alone and need some guidance, contact us and we will be happy to help.

Bemari news

We have given our branding and website a “facelift” (www.bemari.co.uk) - do you like our new look? In redesigning our website, we tried to make sure that we reduce the overall digital footprint - next month we will be sharing a case study on how we did it and what we learned.

If you want to share your feedback on the new design, have a question or found a bug — send us an email to [email protected].