NAT.A05.EA Circular and Nature-Positive Transition Assessment
About the data
This metric was designed by The World Benchmarking Alliance, more information can be found here. Sources and Alignments for each indicator can be found here as well as the scoring guidelines here
The World Benchmarking Alliance's Nature Benchmark measures and ranks the world's most influential companies on their efforts to protect our environment and its biodiversity.
This metric relates to the Indicator: The company's business model embeds circularity and follows a pathway that aligns with nature's full recovery by 2050.
Rationale: Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse is one of the top five threats to humanity (WEF, 2020). Over half of the world's GDP is dependent on ecosystem services, and it has been estimated
that nature-positive actions could generate up to USD 10 trillion. There is an urgent need to act by adopting circular and nature-positive business models with a mitigation hierarchy approach at their core. This profound change in the way business interacts with nature is required in order to stabilize biodiversity in the decade to 2030, allow for the recovery of natural ecosystems in the next 20 years and achieve net improvements by 2050 (CBD, 2021).
Methodology
WBA analysed all publicly available group-level disclosure in English on the applicable group website, which was predominantly annual reports and sustainability reports. Draft assessments were then sent to each company inviting them to provide feedback. This feedback could include additional publicly available group disclosure published. These were then reviewed and finalised. Final assessments were then shared with each company before being published online.
For this metric the company needs to show that it looks at both the risks and opportunities of transitioning to a circular economy. A strong emphasis is given to how the company analyses its dependence on the linear economy as well as on it reflects on the impact that staying in a linear economy would have on the business model.
Keywords: Linear, linear risk, Circular risk assessment, circular scenario analysis.