Responding to the final agreement reached at COP15, Sue Armstrong Brown, Global Director for Environmental Standards and Thought Leadership at CDP, said:
“CDP welcomes the agreement reached at COP15, which commits countries to protect 30 per cent of land and sea, cut, phase out and reform environmentally harmful subsidies, and increase finance flows for protecting and restoring nature. Governments must now ensure the Global Biodiversity Framework is a success by implementing new and strengthening current policies that will ensure they deliver against the targets outlined in the framework.
The agreement includes a requirement to ensure that all large companies assess and disclose their risks, impacts and dependencies on nature by 2030, under Target 15. This target received unprecedented support from corporate and financial leaders in recognition of the risks involved in uncontrolled exposure to nature degradation.
In agreeing Target 15, COP15 has set the world on the pathway to making biodiversity disclosure a business norm, as has been achieved for climate-related disclosure. CDP’s experience shows that disclosure is an essential pre-requisite to reducing corporate impacts on the environment, and is a critical achievement from the negotiations.
CDP backed calls to make biodiversity-related disclosure mandatory for businesses under Target 15. While the word ‘mandatory’ does not appear in the final text, the agreement commits governments to encourage and enable disclosure and to ensure large businesses are disclosing from 2030 .
This sends a clear message to all large businesses and financial institutions: you must assess and disclose risks, dependencies and impacts on nature, as governments have agreed to require this by 2030 at the latest.
CDP was encouraged to receive an impressive 87% response rate to our first invitation to businesses to disclose biodiversity data in 2022, and we expect interest to increase following the announcement of the Global Biodiversity Framework. We will work with our disclosers to support them to meet their commitment to transparency regarding biodiversity and the natural world, as we have done for over 20 years across climate, forests and water disclosure.
This is a historic decision that will have global impact: not only supporting companies and financial institutions to understand and act on the risks they face, the opportunities available and impacts they have, but ensuring that governments, regulators, consumers and investors have access to the robust data they need to inform their decision-making. Disclosure is the bedrock of action, and while it was disappointing that the target to reduce negative impacts by half was removed, Target 15 will ensure that corporate action to protect and restore nature is accelerated and mainstreamed.
It will now be up to individual governments to implement policies that ensure this happens.
CDP stands ready to support policymakers to develop high-quality mandatory disclosure regulation for biodiversity, putting more than 20 years of data, insights and expertise at their disposal. We are committed to leveraging our global environmental disclosure system, through which nearly 20,000 entities worth half of global market capitalization disclosed in 2022, to accelerate implementation of the new Global Biodiversity Framework and track progress against its targets. This will be critical in scaling action to protect and restore biodiversity and nature loss across the global economy.”