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Businesses urged to focus on biodiversity in mitigating environmental impact

Xinhua, July 15, 2016 Adjust font size:

The importance of biodiversity is often missed by business organizations looking to understand and mitigate their impacts on the natural environment, according to a report released Thursday by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI).

Human society across the globe ultimately depends on goods and services provided and replenished by the natural environment, and today it is widely recognized that average global consumption of this "natural capital" far outstrips its ability to regenerate, the report says.

Biodiversity plays a fundamental role in ecosystem functioning, and therefore underpins this ability to regenerate and the delivery of all ecosystem benefits, according to the report.

The CCI is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and leading internationally-focused biodiversity conservation organizations clustered in and around Cambridge, UK.

"Biodiversity is essential to everyday life. It boosts ecosystem productivity and underpins most of the services that we all use and value on a daily basis," said one of the report's lead authors, Thomas Maddox from Fauna and Flora International, which is one of the partners of CCI.

However, "its importance is often missed by businesses, which means that their impact on biodiversity and their dependency upon it is overlooked," said Maddox.

The report sets out four positive steps that can be taken to put biodiversity at the forefront of decision-making about environmental impact.

These include: the stock of natural capital should be at the heart of any natural capital assessment; targets with respect to biodiversity should be identified; indicators that provide information on the state of biodiversity that a business is responsible for, or has a commitment to, should be developed; the cost of delivering biodiversity targets should be estimated and reported in natural capital accounts to reflect a company's liability with regards to maintenance of natural capital assets on which it depends or has impact.

"When businesses are looking to understand and mitigate their environmental impacts, biodiversity needs to be at the forefront of their assessment," said Dr. Bhaskar Vira, another author of the report from the University of Cambridge. Endit