Workshop: Facilitate your sustainability transition
by linking your Circular Economy action to improving your impact on Biodiversity

 

The event took place as part of the 10-Day Challenge of WeValueNature and the Capitals Coalition. A very international crowd of consultants, managers and businesses/organizations joined our 3-hour webinar. During the webinar companies learned how they can easily link the two topics, implement measures and thereby close the gap between the maturity level of sustainability in an organization and biodiversity.

 

 

While the introductory part of the session was meant to understand and scan the attendees’ maturity level in sustainability embedding, the second part focused in assessing the sustainability maturity gap. Here, we helped participants to individually identify their weak points and target their needs. First easy actionable steps were supposed to help the participants to understand how the maturity gap can be improved and how the interrelation between Circular Economy and Biodiversity works.

 

Biodiversity not perceived as linked to other sustainability topics

 

Interestingly, the attendees showed a wide spread of maturity levels, which provides evidence that this kind of topic attracts businesses and organizations from all kinds of sustainability maturity levels. All observed a gap on maturity levels, but barely anyone indicated concrete, structural action. Also, no participant understood Biodiversity as being inherently linked to other sustainability topics they addressed during the workshop.

 

 

Closing the gap: The “actionability barrier”

 

Here we presented and identified an actionability barrier which can help accelerate in Circular Economy and Biodiversity at the same time. We discussed in an open dialogue our input on how to link Biodiversity to Circular Economy and get it started from there. The participants were encouraged to share their best practices in linking Biodiversity with Circular Economy. We note a high interest in taking easy action on Biodiversity through Circular Economy: both within the registered participants and in the recent literature (i.e. it is an approach mentioned in the Dasgupta report(LINK)).

 

 

Taking action on Biodiversity

 

We will take this webinar as a first approach to businesses in engaging them further into Biodiversity. Exchanging with the communicty the Capitals Coalition has put in place is a great opportunity to research further this topic and design a hands on metodology, adapted to different sizes and maturity or business organisations.

We would like to thank WeValueNature and the Capitals coalition for providing us the space to interact with an international community af business stakeholders and sustainability drivers and put forward this interesting approach.