A show of hands at the close of yesterday’s first Global Business of Biodiversity  conference confirmed that businesses recognise the need, and have the will, to protect the ecosystem services on which they all depend. But the day’s proceedings also revealed the challenges ahead for businesses to place biodiversity at the top of their agendas.

Full accounting of ecosystem services will involve paying the true cost of using all of nature’s resources, including pure air, clean water, fertile soil and flood protection, which are currently taken freely without consideration of their future availability.

The conference opened with a plea from HRH Prince Charles, via video link, for companies to stop blindly plundering natural resources and start incorporating environmental accounting into their core business plans.

Bob Watson, Chief Scientific Advisor for Defra, stressed that we cannot continue to use ecosystem services for free but now need to put a price on them. He also pointed out that biodiversity protection needs to be integrated across all land areas and it’s not enough just to conserve small pockets of land as national parks.

Professor Brian Collins, Chief Scientific Advisor for BIS, pointed out that businesses are used to taking social responsibility for the impact of their work on local communities but now need to take environmental responsibility too.

Delegates also heard perspectives from industry. Tom Albanese, Chief Executive of Rio Tinto, said that they had been forced to respond to public opposition to their mining activities ten years ago. Their voluntary commitment to have a positive impact on biodiversity since 2004 has meant that they are now in a position to be environmental leaders in their field.

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Business Report (TEEB D3) was launched during the day by study leader, Pavan Sukhdev. He spoke of biodiversity as ‘the living fabric of this planet’, and the need to recognise the full public wealth, not just a market price, of this commodity to all of society.

The report, aimed at all business sectors, looks at the direct and indirect impact on nature of our business practices. There are lots of examples illustrating the true cost of our natural capital, such as the estimated 150–190 billion dollars that pollination services are worth to agriculture every year.

During the middle of the day the conference broke up into difference sessions and master classes exploring how different business sectors can address biodiversity issues. 

At the end of the day, delegates reconvened to hear the Rt Hon Caroline Spelman, MP, Secretary of State for Defra speak. She said that governments must set achievable biodiversity targets for the next ten years at the biodiversity summit in Japan this October.

She used the example of the palm oil industry to call for change. One in ten products on our supermarket shelves contains palm oil and the industry employs 2 million people in Indonesia. However, the increasing demand for it means that biodiversity rich tropical rainforest is being destroyed to plant palm oil plantations. The conference hosted a meeting of palm oil industry experts earlier in the day to discuss these issues.

The Secretary of State announced that from now on the consumption of palm oil in the UK will be mapped and sources located to help increase the use of sustainable palm oil. She concluded by urging each business to take responsibility for sustainable solutions.