The talk at Climate Week, an annual event hosted by the Climate Group and New York City that takes place in conjunction with the UN General Assembly, focused on how currently only 17% of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets are on track for 2030, with nearly half making minimal or moderate progress, and over one-third stalled or in some cases regressing. But the news was not all negative. A report published by the World Economic Forum this week highlights how some of the world’s largest companies are transforming to address their impact on nature.
Carbon offsets will no longer cut it. Increasingly urgent action from businesses is being demanded to preserve and restore ecosystems that communities depend on. In 2022, 196 countries adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which created an international mandate to halt and reverse nature loss. Companies have a key role to play in this transition towards “nature- positive”, spurred on by the GBF’s target to “encourage and enable” businesses to “assess, disclose and reduce biodiversity-related risks and negative impacts”, says the Forum report.
“This report demonstrates that progress is real and achievable,” Gim Huoy Neo, the Forum’s Managing Director, Centre for Nature and Climate and Daniel Pacthod, a senior partner at McKinsey, wrote in the report’s forward.
The report features six case studies that describe how companies have started to address their impact on land, the ocean or freshwater within their operations and across their value chains. The companies are headquartered in six countries and conduct operations across major sectors ranging from energy to agriculture. They include Inter IKEA Group, a multinational conglomerate that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture; Aditya Bitla Group, a global conglomerate that operates companies across 22 industry sectors, spanning fashion, finance, mining and more; Yara, a crop nutrition knowledge and products company; global retailer Walmart; Ørsted, a multinational energy company; and Suntory Holdings, a global producer of soft drinks, beer and whisky.
The report emphasizes how nature will play an increasingly central role in business operations as new reporting and disclosures bring nature to the forefront for investors and consumers.
IKEA is a case in point. As the world’s largest user of wood – 60% of its products contain this natural resource -, IKEA “has both an environmental responsibility and a business imperative to promote healthy forests,” notes the report. Beyond the need to ensure a continued supply of wood as an input for its furniture products, IKEA has found that the state of the world’s forests is an increasingly important concern for its customers. A study conducted by GlobeScan on behalf of IKEA found that 80% of consumers are concerned about the state of the world’s forests and 75% would prefer to buy furniture from a company known for its forest conservation efforts
IKEA began actively addressing the issue of deforestation and the overconsumption of wood in the 1990s. In 2020, it achieved a company-wide goal to source its wood from only sustainable sources. Since then, IKEA raised its ambitions and created a program called “Forest Positive Agenda towards 2030,” which has three main goals:
*Make responsible forest management the norm across the world, by going beyond the wood sourced for IKEA’s business.
* Halt deforestation and reforest degraded landscapes
* Drive innovation to use wood in smarter ways. For example, in 2023, IKEA developed a new technology for recycling fiberboard, a material heavily used in its furniture, which was previously not easily recyclable. This advance will help IKEA in its ambition to create 80% of its particle board from recycled wood by 2030, a significant increase from its current share of 30%.
The steps being taken by IKEA and the other five companies mentioned in the report are expected to not only help them hold on to their current customers but potentially grow their businesses.
Tremendous potential value – up to $10.1 trillion in annual revenue opportunities and cost savings by 2030 – could be unlocked from nature-positive solutions such as precision-agriculture technologies, smart buildings and circular business models in retail and manufacturing, according to the Forum.
“Companies can lead by example – not only to mitigate risks but also to seize opportunities for growth and resilience in a nature-positive and Net-Zero economy,” says the report.
John F. Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (2021-2024), U.S. Department of State, stressed that point during the Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Meetings in New York City this week, which gathered over 1,400 business leaders, policymakers, leaders from international and civil society organizations,
“Meeting the challenge of the climate crisis is the biggest economic opportunity the planet has known since the Industrial Revolution,” said Kerry. “Everything has to be changed. We have to win this battle.”
The initiatives described in the case studies are a starting point “ but we must act now – there is no time to lose,” says the Forum report. It notes that although 79% of Fortune Global 500 companies have announced a clear climate target as of 2023, only 26% had done so for water, 22% for chemical and plastic pollution, 13% for forest loss and less than 10% for biodiversity loss and nutrient pollution.
Participants in this week’s Sustainable Development Impact Meetings engaged in high-level discussions on themes related to the SDGs, including frontier technologies and development; human capital and growth; climate action, nature protection and the energy transition. The meetings highlighted technological advancements and the role of technology in driving SDG progress, the importance of sustainable growth and the need for collaborative action.
IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEK:
ENERGY
There Is Growing Momentum And Investment In Laser-Based Fusion Technology
German fusion energy startup Marvel Fusion raised a $70 million B round to hit technical milestones for its laser-based fusion technology. In a world racing to wean itself off fossil fuels, fusion power promises to be an effectively limitless supply of energy, using widely available materials to re-create conditions that are hotter than the surface of the sun.
HEALTH
In Breakthrough, Israeli Researchers Detect Parkinson’s Markers 15 years Before Symptoms
Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a method to detect protein aggregation in cells that are the hallmark of Parkinson’s disease. This discovery might enable diagnosis up to 15 years before the first symptoms appear, facilitating early treatment or even preventing the currently incurable disease.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Cloudflare’s New Marketplace Will Let Websites Charge AI Bots For Scraping
Cloudflare announced plans to launch a marketplace in the next year where website owners can sell AI model providers access to scrape their site’s content. The marketplace is the final step of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s larger plan to give publishers greater control over how and when AI bots scrape their websites.
Major Changes at OpenAI
OpenAI said it was working on a plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and senior research executives Barret Zoph and Bob McGrew abruptly announced their departures from the company on September 25. Speaking at a conference in Italy on September 26, Altman denied that there was any link between the personnel changes and the restructuring. OpenAI is in talks with investors to raise $6.5 billion. Expected backers include venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures, as well as public companies Microsof, Nvidia and Apple. Reuters reported that the company’s potential $150 billion valuation is contingent on whether it succeeds in executing a corporate restructure, which would also entail the removal of a cap on returns for investors.
3D Printing
World’s first 3D-printed hotel takes shape in Texas.
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