CBD COP 13: India & Germany join hands for side event on Business and Biodiversity

05 Dec, 2016

Mainstreaming Biodiversity in Companies: ‘Biodiversity in Good Company’ Initiative and India Business & Biodiversity Initiative (IBBI) present their experience and recommendations

05th December 2016, 13:15hrs to 14:45hrs, Cancun, Mexico

This video provides the recording of the side event.

The ‘Biodiversity in Good Company’ Initiative and India Business & Biodiversity Initiative (IBBI) organised a joint session at CBD COP 13, Mexico to share the experience on biodiversity mainstreaming practices by the German and Indian Businesses.

The session was chaired by Dr. Elsa Nickel, Director-General Nature Conservation and Sustainable Use of Natural Resources, Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety and Dr. Amita Prasad, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India. Both offices appreciated work done by the businesses and also suggested more ways to make biodiversity topic more prominent.

BIGC presented and released a short publication “Mainstreaming the Topic of Biodiversity in Corporate Sustainability management”. The publication highlights the options available to companies for taking action in the cross-cutting issue that is biodiversity and they now better understand which part of their business activities they have to address in terms of biodiversity management in order to make a difference. The absence of valorisation and incentives, as well as gaps in knowledge and databases, are a hindrance, and limit the room for manoeuvring in companies as well. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides an excellent opportunity to businesses for seeing biodiversity even more strongly within the overall context of sustainable development, and therefore they can play critical role in achieving these goals.

Mr. Ulrich Stöcker, Head of Nature Conservation, Deutsche Umwelthilfe (Environmental Action Germany) presented on “Discussion Forum on Ecosystem Services”. The platform was started with the objective to catalyst a societal dialogue about the opportunities, restrictions and pitfalls of evaluating ecosystem services with collaboration from environment NGO, business platform and two partners from academia. The Target group being Professional audience i.e. policy makers, business, NGOs, academia etc.

 

The India Business & Biodiversity Initiative (IBBI) released a publication “Reimagining Business for Biodiversity Enhancement: Case Studies from Indian Industry” which is a collection of case studies from 9 different Indian companies. The publication highlights work of 9 IBBI member companies in the field of Agriculture, Forestry, Mine, Medicine, Automobile and Infrastructure and how mainstreaming biodiversity benefitted the overall sustainability of their products. These publication also presents analysis of the business cases of the companies work and linked their activities with India’s 12 National Biodiversity Targets (NBT’s).

On the occasion IBBI released a short film on the work of mainstreaming by three IBBI member companies in the field of Agriculture & Furniture sector. The film “Learning from nature” presents first-hand site findings and observations of local stakeholders upon companies work for sustainable management of agriculture and judicious use of forest resources to minimise impacts and dependences on biodiversity.

Ms. Akane Takada-Brady, Environmental Education Planner, Environmental Department, Aleph Inc presented an example of her company’s business case for mainstreaming biodiversity in businesses with involvement of customers and stakeholder. The company is working with farmers for sustainable rise cultivation, which benefited in growth of farm yield as well as reduction in use of chemical fertiliser and pesticides. The overall positive impact was observed on good insect biodiversity of agriculture farms.

The session was attended by more than 40 participants.