Video transcript: PwC's Centre for Nature Positive Business

We rely on the natural environment for many vital ecosystem services and natural assets in order to survive and thrive. 

The Centre for Nature Positive Business has been set up to help companies take positive action on nature.

Wildlife has declined 69% since 19701.

This loss of biodiversity is only increasing.

We need to get organizations to understand how they’re dependent on these ecosystem services and natural assets and how they’re impacting the natural environment

55% of the world's GDP is highly or moderately dependent on nature2.

If we don’t look at the risks and we don’t look at addressing what those impacts are, businesses will start to fail. 

Nature in particular, is an incredibly complex issue.

It requires expertise from many different areas, whether that be through indigenous knowledge, a policy angle, strategy development, all the way to kind of nature finance, and that’s what PwC can do - is concisely bring all of this information together and help our clients on that journey.

The Centre for Nature Positive Business is really PwC, bringing together expertise from across our network.

It’s about finding solutions but also making sure that we can build them in the right way.

We have people who are data scientists, we have people that are specialists in artificial intelligence. 

We’ve got people with backgrounds in hydrology and in ecology, in atmospheric sciences. 

The diversity of these backgrounds is so, so important because of the complexity and diversity of the problems. 

It’s really important that businesses start to build credible nature strategies. 

There are incoming regulations, there are expectations from customers, but also investors. 

But also there are severe risks to their business model. 

There is not an industry which is unaffected by this and we all need to approach this together and understand it. 

PwC led the working group on data and analytics for the Task Force for Nature Related Financial Disclosures . 

This global collaboration with territories around the world allowed us to provide insights into what nature related data is and how it can be used by organisations to assess their dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities. 

Given the complexity of the standard, these recommendations, we’ve been working with nine of New Zealand’s biggest companies, helping those clients understand what it means tothink about nature related risk dependency and impact. 

The Clean Coast Clean Waters Initiative was hugely successful and it’s been cited as probably one of British Columbia’s largest clean up projects ever. For me, seeing the work that we have done as a bit of a launchpad for a much broader initiative is, is really a clear signal that what we’ve done has hopefully brought them some value. 

For me, it’s not work. For me this is a mission and it’s really about advancing that agenda to change the way that businesses operate. That businesses continue to be able to run but also that there is a more positive legacy to be left for the next generation.

The thing that excites me the most about the work I do is being able to work with companies taking action on nature.

We are talking about essentially the planet and the planet's ongoing surviving prosperity. 

To be a very small cog in the solution that drives change in that space is certainly a very rewarding place to be working.