Environmental

Biodiversity & Brands – A #ProvenanceLive Recap

For World Earth Day 2020, Provenance focused its digital meetup on the topic of biodiversity. What is it and what does it mean for brands, their ingredients and their overarching impact? Here’s what they learned…
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Key Takeaways
  • Biodiversity is about creating resilience in natural ecosystems, crucially important for food security.
  • If you can measure it, you can manage it. ‘Natural capital’ assessments can help you understand what you’ve got, from trees or wildlife on your land to other resources. This was once something only ecologists dealt with, but now we’re seeing financial directors accounting for nature as assets – an addition to the balance sheet.
  • Diversity within a species is crucially important. Tim tells the story of single species of bees overworking apple trees whereas different bees pollinate and work the trees in a more balanced way.
  • We have to integrate nature decisions into our business decisions. We once thought it best to seal them off, but an integrated, holistic approach is the way forward for brands.
  • Transparency is key to building trust with customers and building an authentic story about your impact on natural ecosystems and biodiversity.
  • Re-wilding can be very effective. Robert is now leading a project to measure and compute the biodiversity net-gain you can get from re-wilding efforts.

This resource was originally published by our partners at Provenance - a platform that empowers brands to make the sourcing and impact behind their products transparent. 

From a poll off the back of our latest talk on packaging, the Provenance community voted up the topic of ingredients and environmental impact for our digital Q&A series, #ProvenanceLive, which runs every Wednesday at 5pm GMT. 

To bring insights from different perspectives, we were joined by Robert Spencer, Head of Sustaina…