Pioneering Nature-Positive Pathways: Organisational Approaches for delivering Nature Recovery

The Global Biodiversity Framework calls upon the private sector to contribute to nature recovery. But so much about the concept of Nature Positive is ill defined, making it challenging for businesses (and society as a whole) to understand the major shifts required to achieve it.

More research is crucial to help guide and prioritize business actions.

A recent pre-print led jointly by Thomas White (The Biodiversity Consultancy/ University of Oxford) and Talitha Bromwich (Wild Business Ltd /University of Oxford) highlights four  key areas for research.

💡   Strategic options – Setting strategic priorities and actions at the organizational and sectoral levels.
⚙️   Implementation by companies – Designing and implementing business plans and actions to address impacts, protect and restore biodiversity.
💷   Driving processes – Acting to influence the systemic drivers of business action (e.g. policy, finance) that determine the ‘rules of the game’.
📊   Outcomes – Monitoring and reporting outcomes to ensure that action is effective, and scales to deliver outcomes in line with global biodiversity goals.

Tom explains “Businesses have a key role to play in helping bend the curve of biodiversity decline, but there are currently large uncertainties about the suitable strategies and approaches they should take.”

Hollie Booth, a contributing author, adds: “Given the scale of the biodiversity crisis, prioritized research is needed to inform rapid and proportionate action that can deliver the transformative change urgently needed. We hope the research questions we identified can foster collaborative impactful research, enabling meaningful and well-evidenced private sector action which contributes to a nature positive future.”

The paper was produced collaboratively between us and the University of Oxford’s Nature Positive Hub – a research partnership formed to bridge the gap between business practice and conservation science, and deliver practical, prioritized research that delivers for both business and biodiversity.

Learn more about the work programme associated with this paper here