Few companies understand their true impact on nature, leaving themselves exposed to a variety of risks.
The Science Based Targets initiative has released its first Science-Based Targets for Nature (SBTN) to help companies address their most urgent impacts and dependencies (link in comments):
- They are designed to be measurable, actionable and time-bound to help companies build actual strategies to reach them.
- The underlying methodology has been broken down into a 5-step process: Assess, Interpret and prioritise, Measure, set and disclose, Act, and Track.
- For now, released guidance focus on the first three steps and only include freshwater and land targets. Biodiversity and ocean will follow on 2024 (see roadmap).
- It remains to be seen whether the proposed targets are ambitious enough: climate-related SBTs have been criticised for only being aligned with giving a 66% chance of staying within a 2°C trajectory.
- The complexity of the final framework will also be scrutinised so as not to waste company's precious time working out what their contribution should be instead of actively implementing their transition strategy.
SBTs for nature should allow companies to reduce their impacts and dependencies on nature and operate in alignment with planetary boundaries. Let's hope this idea will lead the framework's further developments.