Engagement with companies

At a series of four virtual workshops on biodiversity ‘Engagement with companies’, members of the Finance@Biodiversity Community have been sharing experiences. The last workshop, held on 4 October, highlighted best practices by leading companies.

In 2021 the Finance@Biodiversity Community (part of the EU Business and Biodiversity Platform) is focusing its sharing of experience and collective learning on the subject of ‘Engaging with companies’. This covers both the engagement of investors with publicly listed companies, but also the engagement of banks with their clients.

NextGreen facilitates the F@B Community and developed these workshops together with its members, in response to their needs. The first three workshops focused on:

  1. 29 April: Financial institutions’ experiences and their need for collaborative engagement on biodiversity;
  2. 23 June: Expert views and sector references from the World Bank, World Benchmarking Alliance, Nature Alpha, IUCN and WWF; and
  3. 22 July: Identifying high-impact and high-dependency sectors.

For the final workshop in the series, held on 4 October, leading companies shared their biodiversity work and reflected on the engaging role of financial institutions. Nadine McCormick (Manager of Nature Action at WBCSD) kicked off the workshop by presenting WBCSD’s building blocks for nature positive value chains. These building blocks provided a valuable framework within which the insights were structured form the dialogues with speakers from Heijmans, Wienerberger and Livelihood Ventures.

The Finance@Biodiversity Community and the Finance for Biodiversity Foundation are currently building on the results of the workshop series by drafting a guide on engagement with companies.

View the minutes and slides from the 4 October workshop.

View the minutes, slides and detailed sectors annex from the first, second and third workshops.

On 9 November, WBCSD launched an updated version of the building blocks for nature positive value chains.

Read more about this project on the Finance@Biodiversity Community project page.