Keep your audience in mind
When a sustainability team wants to address nature, its biggest priority should be getting executive buy-in, says Sinclair. “Until you have executive buy-in, there’s almost no point in doing anything that is not pushing in that direction.”
This sentiment was echoed in the Vogue Business deep dive into what makes a winning sustainability team earlier this year, which found that the teams managing to pull off meaningful transformations were more focused on translating sustainability into something that anyone, at any layer of the business, could resonate with. To do this effectively, they need a strong grip on who they’re pitching to, where their existing knowledge sits, and who has their ear. “If it’s the chief procurement officer pitching instead of the sustainability team, it’s more likely to be seen as a critical issue,” says Sinclair.
“The goal is to be able to say: we might have 90 other problems, but if the dye doesn’t stick, or the cotton isn’t this specific strand length, or we don’t have this specific leather, then it’s going to have a massive financial impact,” he explains. According to a new report from Biodiversify and Little Blue Research, based on a survey of 229 sustainability practitioners across more than 30 countries, climate resilience now trumps compliance as the main reason business leaders act on nature. At the same time, 53% of those practitioners say building the business case for nature is their biggest challenge.
At the end of the day, money talks, and the latest science clearly connects nature to financial returns, says ecologist and Nature’s Echo author Tom Crowther. “Until now, humans have needed to remove nature in order to increase food production,” he explains. But at a certain point, removing nature means depleting resources. “We’ve found — very recently — that the planet is just beyond this tipping point. So now, in order to maximize production, our best option is not to remove nature, but to restore it. Global markets are increasingly going to depend on improved nature.”
