Convincing business people about the importance of nature conservation in their strategic decisions and everyday activities is a significant task. Understanding this, CEEweb for Biodiversity — an international network of NGOs in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region — organized a business and biodiversity conference on 29 February 2008. We started thinking on organizing this conference in the second half of 2007. This was the time when we got involved in the preparations of the High Level Conference on Business and Biodiversity (hosted by Portugal on 11-12. November 2007). Our own conference, which took place in Budapest, convened fifty participants from the government, civil and financial sectors as well as SMEs. We made it a special point to share national best practices to inspire the participants in their everyday lives: As entrepreneurs, they could get involved more deeply in nature conservation and, at the same time, could boost profits. Several constructive suggestions came up during the meeting, among, which the following: Solutions are needed to better distribute European funds, thus allowing more effective participation of SMEs in grant programmes; Incentives (such as state guarantees or fiscal policies) could help the development of credit lines for biodiversity ‘friendly’ SMEs; and Tools are needed to better assess the biodiversity impacts of biodiversity businesses. CEEweb will be advocating for such proposals in Brussels. Overall, we were happy to see that stakeholders were enthusiastic and actively participated in the issue. If we want this process to be successful, it is ever so important to give people a chance to participate actively in common events and to form and maintain new relationships.

Veronika Kiss is Business and Biodiversity Coordinator, CEEweb for Biodiversity.