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Business represents a threat to biodiversity but also a potential source of help through innovation, funding and technology, according to a UNU Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) researcher.

And for business, biodiversity now has a growing and direct relationship to business risk and opportunity (and in turn to share price), profits, costs, public relations and reputation, brand, customer and employee retention, access to new markets and competitiveness, said Kerry ten Kate, Director of Investor Responsibility at Insight Investment and a Senior Visiting Fellow at UNU-IAS

Ms. ten Kate was one of the featured speakers at a panel discussion on socially responsible investment (SRI) co-organised by UNU-IAS during the 7th conference of parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, held in Kuala Lumpur in February.

"Access to land to exploit new sites is thus vital to extractive and utility companies. Companies are acknowledging the business risk of the potential of public concern about biodiversity resulting in restrictions to land," said ten Kate.

"Growing resource scarcity, increasing development pressures on biodiversity and escalating public concern pose a strategic threat to extractive and utility industries. These companies may be denied access to resources in new sites in the medium and long term, with corresponding risks to revenues, unless they demonstrate high standards with respect to biodiversity conservation."

Private sector spending arguably matters to the cause of biodiversity far more profoundly than the relatively small amount spent by governments or multilateral agencies, says ten Kate, defining corporate responsibility as meeting or exceeding the ethical, legal, commercial or public expectations in business practices.

"There is an enormous opportunity for business to contribute to the goals of the UN Convention on Biodiversity through better practices," she said. Investors can be key allies of the CBD by using their money in ways that help influence business behavior.

The February 11 forum was designed to convene representatives of some of the biggest fund managers to examine the potential for developing effective screens for GMOs and biodiversity, with a view to promoting the role of SRI to support the aims of the Convention.

The forum was told that a new breed of fund managers looking to pressure businesses to improve social, environmental and ethical performance now wield more than $640 billion in clout in the UK alone – more than 12% of all managed investments in that nation.

"Meaningful engagement of the private sector in addressing biodiversity and other environmental concerns has been elusive until now and confined to isolated instances. However, this is about to change,” said UNU-IAS director A.H. Zakri.

"Carbon trading systems, the growing number of investments needed to protect nature’s watershed services, the advent of labeling schemes for genetically modified food products, the emphasis of global environmental agreements on private sector involvement, and the rise of socially responsible investment portfolios are just a some of the signs that the private sector is at last being drawn into the critical biodiversity issue."

UNU-IAS researcher Sam Johnston said the first industry-wide survey, conducted in 1984, identified $40 billion in assets in funds which feature a screen of some type for social responsibility. By 1995, the figure had risen to $639 billion and to $2.18 trillion in 2003. In the United States, such SRI portfolios grew by more than 240 percent from 1995 to 2003, 40% more than the 174 percent growth of the universe of assets under professional management.

"Money talks. And we need to hear its full voice in the biodiversity crisis," said UNU Rector Hans van Ginkel.

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