Sneak Peek: TEEB's Upcoming Business Report

Becca Madsen on April 21, 2010 Comment

I was recently asked to review a chapter for an upcoming Business report that the folks at The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (or TEEB*) are working on. The draft chapter I reviewed was on scaling up biodiversity opportunities. While the document is being finalized (expected release: July 2010, here), I thought I'd give a sneak peek of what's to come.

First off, this is going to be a pretty huge report. The chapter I reviewed was 50+ pages, and was just one of seven chapters. Then again, it's not easy to distill Why Biodiversity Is Important for Business and Please Do Something About It.

The chapter provides a good explanation and case studies on biodiversity opportunities for business, including: 1) businesses saving money or reducing risk by adapting biodiversity-friendly practices (Corporate Social Responsibility-type activities), 2) businesses making money based on products enabled by biodiversity (eg - pharmaceuticals, ecotourism), and 3) business opportunities for making money on biodiversity in 'ecosystem service markets'. There's a discussion about REDD and opportunities there, and then the chapter concludes with a review of incentives for biodiversity business. There's a lot more to it, but that's the content in a nutshell.

Another thing that struck about the draft chapter was mention of a couple different movements in assurances of sustainability. For example, the Forest Footprint Disclosure Project (modeled after the Carbon Disclosure Project) was created to provide new transparency of companies' effect on deforestation. The project will provide information to investors (and to companies - to help them manage their supply chains) to weigh whether they thought a company's forest footprint indicated risky behavior. For more background, check out EM's 2009 article on the initiative.

Also interesting bit was a box on the ISEAL alliance (ISEAL is a "global association for social and environmental standards"). ISEAL is gathering information on social and environmental standards and their impacts and will be centralizing all of this information into one comprehensive online database in 2010.

Ecosystem Marketplace will follow up on any other insights from the full report after its release later this summer.

*What's TEEB? For those of you not yet familiar with TEEB, it's an initiative that aims to do for biodiversity what the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change did for momentum on climate change policy. The TEEB initiative is led by Deutsche Bank's Pavan Sukdhev and is hosted by UNEP. TEEB released a report for policy-makers in 2009 and will be releasing 3 more reports in 2010: one for local policy-makers, one for business, and one for citizens.