The Guardian has ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but what about our wider impact on nature? This is a question we are beginning to ask ourselves to help understand how our activities can affect the biodiversity crisis, as well as the climate crisis.
Science tells us that the two are linked and equally pressing. It’s understood that humanity needs to restore the natural world to reach targets on climate – to stop burning fossil fuels, but also to suck carbon out of the atmosphere into healthy ecosystems. Through our reporting, we are raising awareness of the scale of the biodiversity crisis and potential ways to avert catastrophic loss of wildlife, and although we are much smaller than many of the businesses we report on, looking at our own biodiversity impact is a natural next step.
The process of measuring an organisation’s impact on wildlife is much less mature than understanding its impact on carbon emissions, but now is the time to start. The next decade of UN targets to save the natural world are currently being drawn up at Cop15 in Montreal – including an ambition to make it mandatory for large businesses to report on their nature impacts. We already have data to look at our company carbon footprint, and carbon emissions are one of the main drivers of biodiversity decline. In order to think about broader biodiversity impact, organisations need to consider other factors: use and pollution of water, use of land and pollution of air.
The University of Oxford was one of the first institutions to comprehensively evaluate and disclose its impact on biodiversity. The methodology we are working with is laid out in this piece, published in the journal Nature in April 2022. It says “every large organisation should plot a path to net gain in biodiversity — here’s how”. Our audit, which we started in October, is being done by Oxford’s lead researcher Dr Joseph Bull through his environmental consultancy, Wild Business. Dr Talitha Bromwich, also from the University of Oxford, is analysing Guardian data alongside the Guardian’s sustainability team.
We look forward to sharing the results of our audit next year. This is still a new area of research, but we are committed to understanding and tackling the biodiversity crisis, and the Guardian’s small but important role in it.
As Nature’s analysis concludes, “time is too short to let the perfect be the enemy of the good”.
