Wilderness Society joins global coalition with concerns over businesses attempting to greenwash their impacts on nature.

Banks, investors and companies have developed tools to understand their climate impacts and the risks that climate change creates for them. Yet over half of the world’s economic output is dependent on nature, and nature is deteriorating worldwide at an alarming rate.

Businesses have yet to understand their impacts on nature and the risks nature destruction creates.

The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosure was established in 2021 to respond to this need by creating a common way for companies to report on nature-related risks and impacts, called a ‘nature risk management and disclosure framework’. The idea is to help financial institutions and companies take nature into account when making business and financial decisions. The end goal of this framework is that global financial players, once they become more aware of how much they are at risk from biodiversity loss, will act to help protect nature rather than destroy it. 

However, the Taskforce’s work, still in development, is currently on the path to being a shield to protect companies from needing to take action, i.e. a greenwashing scheme, rather than exposing key risks and driving change. 

The Wilderness Society, together with 47 civil society organisations across the world, has signed an open letter to the TNFD expressing ‘profound concerns’ that the process is undermining the real solutions to the nature crisis. While it states it takes a science-based approach, the Taskforce’s process has lacked transparency and has failed to properly involve civil society organisation: instead it is made up of 34 global corporations, including several with a highly concerning environmental and human rights track record. 

In its current form, the TNFD essentially says that a company is doing right by nature if it uses the framework – but the framework doesn’t even require companies to look at their harmful impacts on biodiversity. It also ignores companies’ potential impacts on human rights and doesn’t ask businesses to make their supply chains more transparent. In its current state, the TNFD has serious flaws and is set to facilitate greenwashing instead of moving money away from destructive activities. 

Tim Beshara, Manager of Policy and Strategy at the Wilderness Society, says: “The world needs a hard-edged biodiversity disclosure regime that will facilitate the movement of money away from destructive activities. We don’t need a bookclub for industry lobbyists to greenwash capital’s complicity in the biodiversity crisis. So many of the participants and stakeholders that have leapt upon the TNFD have been the very same industry groups and companies who have actively campaigned against environmental and First Nations rights in Australia for the last 50 years. To see their participation in the TNFD without any consequent indication that they are changing or willing to change their approach is ringing alarm bells for us. We are looking for something better than this.”