Round-up of Biodiversity News

Becca Madsen on September 8, 2010 Comment

This month brings more developments on the TEEB front. If you haven't yet cracked the hefty report, Ecosystem Marketplace provides a quick review here. We keep seeing indications that businesses (or at least some businesses) are getting the message. Last month, we noted that Japanese firms had signed onto a "Japan Business and Biodiversity Partnership" , just as Germany had adopted a similar initiative when they hosted the CBD COP9. Now Brazil appears to be following along, with their "Corporate Movement for the Protection and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity."

These country-level initiatives may be nice, but are businesses actually changing their practices in regards to biodiversity? News this month indicates yes - an article in Japanese media highlights two Japanese companies identifying ways to profit from biodiversity-friendly products. World Resources Institute, meanwhile, is celebrating a milestone in the adoption of their Corporate Ecosystem Services Assessment methodology - 200 companies have put their assessment to use. We've also heard that the German business and biodiversity initiative released a "Corporate Biodiversity Management Handbook" in June.

Other developments in TEEB for Business include efforts to develop corporate accounting standards that measure sustainability/environmental impacts - see our summary in the September issue of Mitigation Mail

In the US, we initially saw a dearth of news and assumed the mitigation industry was hard at work getting restoration projects on the ground. A little digging, however, found announcements of quite a few (10) newly-approved wetland and conservation banks. The latest issue of the National Wetlands Newsletter (subscription required) brings interesting news for the wonkiest of us: a study on how US ACE Districts determine the service area of banks and an article related to data accessibility of US ACE wetlands data. Speaking of data accessibility, the RIBITS wetland bank information tool continues to add information and functionality, and now features 28 of 38 Districts' bank information (with some caveats), and four new reporting tools. See summaries of all this and more in the US MITIGATION NEWS section of September's Mitigation Mail newsletter.