Global Leaders Call For New Framework To Help Businesses Make Better Decisions

Global leaders convene to launch a new framework that will help businesses make better decisions by including natural capital.

Representatives from over 160 of the world’s leading organizations, spanning business, finance, accounting, conservation, academia, and policy, meet today in London to celebrate the culmination of a unique collaborative project that has produced the first global Natural Capital Protocol.

The Natural Capital Protocol is a standardized framework designed to generate trusted, credible, and actionable information that business managers need to make truly informed decisions. It brings together and builds on a number of approaches that already exist to help business measure and value natural capital, and, by harmonizing them, will allow all businesses everywhere to benefit from understanding their relationships with nature.

The Protocol represents public and private sectors coming together in a unique collaboration, under voluntary contracts, to create something for the common good, and is freely available to all under a Creative Commons license.

38 diverse organizations formed the Protocol’s core development team (see notes), and over 450 organizations provided input over the course of the two year project. With the global challenges we face, such collaboration through voluntary partnerships will become ever more crucial, and the Protocol is proof of what can be achieved.

According to a 2013 report commissioned by the Natural Capital Coalition, half of all existing corporate profits would be at risk if the costs associated with natural capital were to be internalized through market mechanisms, regulation or taxation. A water shortage, for example, would have a catastrophic impact on 40% of Fortune 100 companies.

Natural capital brings together the environmental strands of climate, water, energy, biodiversity and waste into a uniform strategic approach. If adopted at scale, the Natural Capital Protocol has the power to revolutionize the way that businesses evaluate their operations and make decisions, helping them to reduce pollution, protect biodiversity, and limit the impacts of climate change, while simultaneously producing positive business results, safeguarding operations and supporting efforts to create a more sustainable world.

The Protocol has been through a comprehensive consultation and piloting process. Organizations and professionals from six continents offered over 3,200 comments during the consultation, and over 50 leading businesses piloted the Protocol, including Dow, Shell, the Coca-Cola Company, Kering, Hugo Boss, Yorkshire Water, Nestle, Interface, Olam and Nespresso, with many more lining up to apply the Protocol once it is launched.