December 15 – Two United Nations summits in successive months – the first on climate change in Sharm el-Sheik, and the second on biodiversity in Montreal – means one thing: a blitz in corporate promises to address environmental threats.The World Economic Forum captures the mood. Looking to plug a new white paper on how business can help deliver the U.N,’s much-delayed post-2022 biodiversity framework, the Geneva-based organisation declares that “business will help halt and reverse biodiversity loss”.The number crunchers at international non-profit organisation CDP might reasonably disagree. The London-based transparency specialist, for the first time, included questions about biodiversity impacts in its climate questionnaire this year. It found that among the 31% of respondents that had made a public commitment and/or endorsed biodiversity-related initiatives, 55% of them had taken no action in the last 12 months to advance these goals .“We’ve seen a hell of a lot of commitments in the nature space over the past number of years, but many of them actually never materialise,” says Gavin Dexter, CDP’s global director for corporations and supply chains.This delivery shortfall is evident in CDP’s latest A list report, which sees only 103 of the 3,908 companies that reported on how they manage water risk getting an ‘A score’. The number of ‘A-listers’ among the 1,048 that reported on forests is even lower, at 25.“The story is still very much that organisations are not taking sufficient action (but), going forwards, the key thing will be to ensure that organisations making these commitments are actually achieving them,” Dexter adds. A field of spinach is irrigated in California. Only 103 of the 3,908 companies that report to CDP on how they manage water risk received an A-listing. REUTERS/Caitlin OchsAnd these are the front-runners. Over two-thirds (69%) of the companies that responded to CDP’s questionnaire still have no formal objective in place as far as halting today’s unprecedented biodiversity loss is concerned.The failure to act is particularly worrying among sectors with substantial footprints on the natural world. Despite rising consumer attention and regulatory pressure, most apparel (74%) and manufacturing (73%) brands still make no attempt to assess the impact of their value chain on biodiversity.The picture on climate action, while still “insufficient” according to Dexter, is slightly more promising.In part, this is thanks to the creation of robust protocols, such as the Science Based Targets initiative, which make it harder for brands to maintain a sustained mismatch between promises and performance.Changing regulation plays a large part as well, says Dexter. Pending requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission mean all large companies in the U.S. will soon need to disclose their climate-related information. Similar disclosure obligations face European compan …
Brand Watch: CDP’s ‘A-list’ of climate leaders a reminder of gap between ambition and action – Reuters
