City-state Singapore has become the new home of a global not-for-profit that seeks to help businesses put a value on nature, whose benefits have long been unaccounted for.
The TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) for Business Coalition launched its global headquarters in Singapore this week at an event attended by 100 industry professionals.
The Coalition will study and set methods for ‘natural capital accounting’, which puts a monetary value on the benefits that ecosystems and biodiversity create.
Mr Pavan Sukhdev, TEEB’s study leader, who is also an UNEP Goodwill Ambassador, said at the launch that “the invisibility of corporate externalities is a root cause of many errors of judgement across economics, ecology and governance”.
The corporation is the “most important institution of our time” as it determines policy direction and resource consumption, he added. “Solving this complex problem is a crucial challenge for sustainability, and it will need global collaboration and research expertise of significant scale. I am therefore delighted that so many leading global institutions, who are represented in this Coalition, are combining forces to address this challenge.”
Businesses across the globe rely on ecosystems to provide natural resources such as water and food, and ‘regulatory services’ such as climate regulation and flood management. Yet, 60 per cent of the world’s ecosystem services have been degraded over the past 50 years.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director Achim Steiner said in a statement on Thursday that the work of TEEB “highlights an urgent need to integrate the valuation of natural capital into business practices in the vital private sector”.
Businesses that fail to adapt in a world of increasingly scarce resources will lose competitiveness as the value of these resources is realised through tighter regulation, consumer choice and limited supply, said the Coalition.
The organisation has secured cornerstone funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, as well as from the United Kingdom and Singaporean Governments. Headquartered in Singapore, it will provide a growing knowledge hub in Asia Pacific and internationally on natural capital valuation in business.
The Coalition, which emerged from the original 2008 TEEB initiative, was formally started last year by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) – along with UNEP, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), WWF International, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).
Speaking at the launch, Singapore’s Minister for Environment and Water Resources, Vivian Balakrishnan, said: “I am very glad to have launched the TEEB for Business Coalition here in Singapore, because for all the significant challenges, the only way that we are going to solve them is through a coalition of all the different stakeholders. It is absolutely essential that we get the economics right and the economics has to extend to biodiversity and to the environment.”
The Coalition has been initiated by founding organisations and supporters, which include WWF-UK, Economic Development Board (EDB) of Singapore, and The University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership. The UNEP and the World Bank are observer members while businesses such as Puma and Deutsche Bank are serving in advisory roles.
The board chairmen are Mr Sukhdev and EDB’s director Gerard Ee, while Dr Dorothy Maxwell - who has more than 20 years of experience working in the sustainability sector - has been appointed as director for the coalition and will head a team of six in the Singapore office.
The launch, held at Singapore’s Botanic Gardens, took place as part of the Responsible Business Forum on Sustainable Development organised by Singapore-based Global Initiatives. The forum gathers industry leaders to discuss integration of sustainability and social responsibility to deliver longer-term business success.
