On 28 March, Brazil and the UK co-hosted the Business and Biodiversity Breakfast on the margins of the High-Level Segment at COP-8. The event, which was held at the Graciosa Country Club, convened 300 guests including ministers, heads of delegations and business leaders. In what follows, we reproduce the full speech of Minister Jim Knight MP (UK).
"COP-8 is not just the chance to make progress on over 50 issues, many of them technical. It is also about exchanging ideas and adding momentum. We all know that far from slowing, the decline in biodiversity is accelerating. As things stand we are not going to meet our 2010 target but we must not give up".
The full engagement of business My political values are informed by the idea that we achieve more collectively than individually and I don’t think that unity across government is enough. We need unity of purpose across all sectors – public, voluntary and private. Put bluntly, we cannot hope to achieve our aims without the full engagement of business. We could carry on trying to name and shame those that seek to exploit unsustainably, and hope that has an effect. We can regard all corporations as intrinsically evil and try and regulate them to achieve the public good. I don’t think either approach will work, they provide little incentive to do the right thing, and we simply don’t have time. In the minds of profit makers No, we should do the opposite. We should seek to engage putting ourselves in the minds of the profit making sector. This is about asking not what business can do for biodiversity but what biodiversity can do for business. I believe that by understanding supply chains, understanding how brands like Fair Trade have added value for producers, by understanding the commercial drivers, we can develop some currency in then asking business to do more for biodiversity. I am pleased to report that I have found a growing number of business people willing to sit down and talk about the importance of biodiversity. One example of this willingness is the Business and 2010 Biodiversity Challenge, which my government co-sponsored during 2005. I would like to thank our partners in the London and São Paulo meetings: the CBD Secretariat, the Government of Brazil, Insight Investment, IUCN and the Brazilian Council for Sustainable Development; as well as all of the participants in both meetings. These meetings highlighted an increasing recognition by companies of the business case for managing their impacts on biodiversity as part of their management of risks to their companies’ operations, performance and reputation. The potential impact of business on biodiversity is huge: as a user of vital ecosystem services but also as a contributor to ecosystem change. We realise this potential by harnessing the drivers for business.
Engaging the public Their customers are my voters. We need the public to continue to be engaged in this area and demand action from politicians and demand sustainable products from their retailers – as they are now demanding fair traded products in UK supermarkets. Similarly, in 2003, a survey by an online recruitment agency found that 43% of jobseekers would not work for a company that did not have environmental or ethical policies. That is almost half of the workforce who expects better performance by their employers. Business managers know that a committed and healthy workforce make for a productive business environment. I would like to thank you all for coming here today to talk about how we can help each other reach our mutual aims for biodiversity and for business. I hope I have been a little challenging but we don’t have time for niceties. Globalisation has made international business and global markets the fastest and most flexible force for change there is. Our challenge is to make that progressive change for the good of biodiversity. I look forward to hearing your views.”
In March 2006, Jim Knight MP was Minister for Rural Affairs, Landscape & Biodiversity at the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (
Defra).
Minister Barry Gardiner MP, the new minister for Biodiversity, is keen to continue to work on business and biodiversity and will contribute an article to the forthcoming issue of the CBD ‘Gincana’ magazine .
This speech is also available online
here
The reports of the London (January 2005) and São Paulo (November 2005) “Business and the 2010 Biodiversity Challenge” meetings are available at
http://www.biodiv.org/doc/meeting.aspx?mtg=B2010-01 and
http://www.biodiv.org/doc/meeting.aspx?mtg=B2010-02, respectively.
