Transforming Tomorrow 18 Dr Tim Lamont, from Lancaster Environment Centre, and Pentland Centre Director Professor Jan Bebbington (along with other co-authors) collaborated on an academic paper that benchmarked ecosystem restoration reporting by a sample of corporations. What they found is that while many companies are undertaking restoration efforts, the data provided in sustainability reports did not provide sufficient information about the outcomes of these actions. This led researchers to work with practitioners to test proposed principles for robust reporting of restoration project design and implementation. • Corporations should work within the “mitigation hierarchy” by reporting their efforts to conserve existing habitat as a precursor to planning restoration. • Corporations should work with local stakeholders and decision-makers during the planning and implementation of restoration projects. • Projects should plan for lasting impact. Reports should state the number of years committed to maintenance and monitoring, and/or survival rates and durations of previous projects. • Restoration should be proportional to environmental damage created by corporate activities. • Corporations claiming to restore ecosystems should provide evidence that their initiatives are having the desired ecological impact. Projects should define specific goals of restoration and regularly monitor progress against these goals using quantitative ecological data. • Projects should target and report benefits beyond ecosystem recovery. For example, restoration can support local livelihoods, community engagement, education, research, training, and capacity building. • In many cases, historic baselines are no longer feasible owing to changing environmental conditions. Projects should monitor local “reference ecosystems” to guide efforts in restoring locally appropriate species compositions that are resilient to current and emerging threats. Practitioners and academics collaborated in a workshop in October 2024 to test these ideas. Here is a snapshot of their views. • An excellent project for us is a holistic project that scores well across all our criteria. It’s restoring an area; conserving an area; engaging the local community; and it has a long-term legacy. Catherine Savidge; European Outdoor Conservation Association (EOCA) pictured opposite left • Excellence in this space is being transparent and honest about where you are and where you want to go. It is about achieving the goals you set out. It is having more nature in the world and being fully recovered by 2050. It is working inter-disciplinarily with businesses, academic institutions, financial institutions, and other actors to get the science right, have our actions aligned with global goals, and move as a collective towards a nature-positive outcome. Rachel Martin; Nature Positive Initiative, opposite bottom right • Part of our work is thinking about what it means for a business to be contributing to a nature-positive world. Excellent in this context means that we must be really ambitious. We have to go far above what is happening now. We need to make sure things are well-evidenced; we need to make sure the outcomes work for conservation but also for the communities that depend on biodiversity. Excellent means we need to drive up the level of ambition. Dr Thomas White; University of Oxford/Biodiversity Consultancy, opposite middle right • Excellence has many elements when it comes to businessled ecosystem restoration. Perhaps the thing that I find most exciting is that excellence says something about the location where the restoration is taking place, and whether there are other partners in that ecosystem doing things as well. One business can only do so much, but several working together could make a bigger difference. Dr Tim Lamont; Lancaster Environment Centre, opposite top right Principles that should underpin reporting Mitigation hierarchy Inclusion governance Permanence Proportionality Monitoring External benefits Reference ecosystems https://pod.co/transforming-tomorrow/naturerestoration Corporate-Led Environmental Action Reporting (CLEAR) Listen...
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