02 Aug 2021
On 22 July, the G20 Environment Ministers’ meeting in Italy ended with the ministers pledging to adopt new climate targets within the next three months with focus on three broad areas: biodiversity and protection of oceans; promoting circular economies, particularly in the fashion and textile sectors and realigning the financial system to promote sustainable development.
Protection and revival of biodiversity has become an important area of concern for governments across the globe. In India too, various state government policies indicate a transformative shift towards ecology-friendly environment. Indian Industry recognizes the fact that industrial activities not only lead to financial and economic outcomes but also result in non-financial impacts such as environmental and social. Businesses often face the risk of overexploitation of natural resources; land use change; habitat diversion; climate change and pollution which are leading to loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services.
India Business and Biodiversity Initiative (IBBI), conceputalised by MoEFCC and hosted by CII-ITC Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development (CESD) is a business-led initiative providing a national platform for businesses to promote sharing and learning, and ultimately lead to mainstreaming sustainable management of biodiversity in business value chain. IBBI at present has 40 business signatories and 13 stakeholders (including academia, development agencies and NGOs).
Businesses join IBBI by signing a 10 Point Declaration, a commitment towards conservation and sustainable management of biodiversity across their value chain. The declaration provides a roadmap to businesses for mapping biodiversity and ecosystem services across their value chain and identify the linking risks and opportunities. The reporting is done using 21 indicators by two-level approach for making disclosure: Core (reporting on 11 indicators) and Comprehensive (reporting on all indicators). As signatories, IBBI members voluntarily submit biennial disclosure report to present activities undertaken to implement the declaration points.
As per the current reporting cycle, the Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (B&ES) of 369 sites, across 30 businesses, operating in 17 states of India are screened. Through this screening members have identified important ecosystems inter-linking to their operations or supply chain.
The 2021 consolidated report includes findings and key aspects reported by 30 IBBI member companies towards 2020 reporting cycle. The key findings are:
- 84 Biodiversity champions (from the 30 member companies) support internally in driving the positive change across operations
- 43% of these companies consider biodiversity as core material value
- 38% of them have a dedicated ‘Biodiversity Policy’
- 40% of them have adopted ‘No Net Loss’ approach into their business decision-making & strategy to achieve nature positivity
- More than half of the members have clearly defined science-based targets and adopted nature-based solution to reverse and halt nature loss
- More and more members are creating non-monetary benefits through sustainable supply chain management, community engagement, education & knowledge sharing and partnerships at local level
- Almost all members are linking their initiatives and programmes to UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to ensure positive outcome
- All members have an in-built process and follow timely monitoring of risks across their value chain.
The key finding of the report are shared as inputs to MoEFCC for submission of National Biodiversity Report and presented to UN CBD for consideration. To access the full report, click here.