Discovering your Nature Opportunities

Finding out how your business can help protect and restore nature can unlock a huge range of benefits for your sustainability strategy and your wider operations.

Nature Positive Tourism is about more than reducing our impacts on nature – it also involves action to help restore nature and build back biodiversity. That may seem like a big ask, but in fact Travel & Tourism businesses are uniquely positioned to do this. A full assessment of your dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities includes getting a good understanding of how (and where) you are best placed to have a positive impact.

Seizing these opportunities isn’t just a matter of looking good or ‘giving back’, it can present all sorts of advantages for your business. From developing product offers and increasing customer loyalty to compensating for carbon emissions and enhancing ESG credentials, you don’t know what you are missing until you have looked!

Why do we need to restore nature?

All around the world, nature has been damaged and degraded over decades and centuries. Last Friday, 16th May, was Endangered Species Day, highlighting the 47,000 species known to be threatened with extinction. Deforestation, overfishing, pollution … the process continues. Despite some protections, in many places nature is still being lost, year by year.

The latest analysis from the Stockholm Resilience Institute found that we have already crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries they assessed. These include the sustainable limits, or ‘safe operating spaces’, for biodiversity, land use, freshwater and climate change.

This is why the Nature Positive Initiative – a collaboration including leading sustainability initiatives like Business for Nature, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development – highlights that we need to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.

What does restoring nature involve?

Restoring nature means helping the natural world to recover. That could be expanding forests by creating corridors to connect existing patches or enabling animal populations to thrive by reducing hunting pressure. It can also include improving the quality of existing areas, for instance by limiting human activity in wild places, or encouraging wildlife in human-dominated spaces like agricultural lands.

In some cases, projects are carefully planned to return damaged areas to health, for instance by using the Society for Ecological Restoration standards. In other cases, stopping damaging practices can be enough to allow nature to restore itself.

How do you start?

As a Travel & Tourism business, figuring out how to contribute to nature restoration may seem daunting. But in fact the approach is quite simple.

If you are a multi-destination business, you will need to start by working out where to focus your efforts. You should start with destinations where you have the largest presence, in terms of footfall or income, or where nature is a main feature of your customer offer. Then do a high-level assessment of the pressures on nature in these places – how many rare species or habitats there are, and how great the threats to them are – to make a shortlist of focus destinations.

What can you do?

Once you know where to focus, you can do a more detailed assessment, looking at national nature strategies and international priorities to identify key issues. From these, you can choose a threat or challenge that is relevant to your operations or internal priorities. (Or we could help you with our new Destination Insight service …)

Pick Your Partners

When you know the ‘where’ and the ‘what’, you can move onto the ‘how’. Working with a range of partners – from existing suppliers to government agencies to local NGOs – is likely to be the best way to maximise your positive impact. Suitable candidates can be found with some targeted research, as well as by asking existing contacts (or you could talk to us about our Biodiversity Partnerships service).

Bottom line benefits

Committing to restoring nature is great for boosting business sustainability and ESG credentials. Linking to local environmental projects also provides opportunities for feelgood visitor experiences that make trips more fulfilling, connecting people to nature and encouraging customer loyalty. At the same time, connecting to wider networks can enable your business to play a central role in sustainable local development and raise the profile of the destinations that you visit.

All of which makes restoring nature an investment opportunity you can’t afford to miss …

David Jay

Biodiversity Partnerships Manager, ANIMONDIAL

Find out more …

• ANIMONDIAL is here to help you identify nature-based opportunities in your destinations. The Animal Protection Network is our directory of animal and nature protection projects that could make perfect partners for your business. But if you can’t find the ideal match there, our Biodiversity Partnerships service can find options that suit your exact needs.
• Read inspiring case studies from around the world in the Nature Positive Tourism Partnership report Nature Positive Travel & Tourism In Action.
• Learn more about ecological restoration from the UN Decade on Ecological Restoration.
• Read our other blogs in this series to learn more about your Nature Dependencies, Impacts and Risks.