Biodiversity is an increasingly important issue on the business agenda as stakeholders such as consumers, financial partners, governments and local communities expect companies to minimize impacts on biodiversity and contribute to biodiversity conservation and sustainable use. At the same time, the conservation community in general and IUCN in particular, recognize the value of substantive engagement with business and industry an important part of society to influence, encourage and assist to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.
In order to achieve more substantive and strategic engagement with the private sector, IUCN developed a Strategy and Action Plan that will guide and reinforce the organization’s efforts to engage with the private sector over the coming years. The initial phase of the Strategy consisted of a situation analysis which identified a need among IUCN Component Programmes for advice and guidance in engagement with the private sector. Nearly all of the Component Programmes interviewed in the context of the situation analysis expressed a keen interest to engage the private sector in the context of their work programmes, but cited difficulty in understanding the private sector and communicating with businesses as a major obstacle to achieving effective links to the private sector. IUCN thus took the decision in 2001 to engage as a member of the business community through a 2 year secondment from IUCN to Shell, then in 2004 to engage a 3 year secondment from Shell to IUCN.
Since 2000 Shell and IUCN have collaborated to foster positive linkages between biodiversity conservation and business. This has included efforts to promote nature conservation through the business operations of Shell and with the private sector in general, as well as efforts to bring business skills to the conservation operations of IUCN and the wider conservation community.
In August 2001, Andrea Athanas was seconded from IUCN to Shell for a period of two years. This was the first time that IUCN had sent a staff member to the private sector. The position had been established:
- to develop guidance and tools on biodiversity;
- to provide advice to Shell Operating Companies on implementing the Group's expectations on biodiversity;
- to work with Shell's conservation partners to deliver agreed projects; and
- to build a strong and lasting relationship between Shell and IUCN.
During her stay at Shell, Andrea addressed several critical issues including integrating biodiversity into EIA guidelines for the oil industry and establishing a principle on operating in sensitive environments.
In 2004 Deric Quaile was seconded from Shell into IUCN for 3 years to largely assist IUCN with the development and implementation of the Private Sector Engagement Strategy and bring a business perspective to that process. Work focused initially on communicating the Strategy, for which the brochure “Greening the Bottom Line” was prepared which outlined the background to the strategy and an approach for implementation. Visits were undertaken to the Regional and Country offices in order to establish specific needs of both businesses in the regions and what the Regional and Country Offices were able to provide given their levels of expertise, capacity and general involvement with business, industry sectors and / or industry representative associations, and recommend ways of building new capacity. Work was started in the Asia Region with focus on Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Thailand and Bangladesh. Additional missions were carried out to ORMA, with specific focus on Costa Rica and Guatemala, and to ROSA, and general support provided to RoFE and the EARO. Work was not only restricted to the Regions but also extended to the thematic programmes, e.g. support to the Global Forests Programme on the formulation of the business case for the Allanblackia project in Ghana with Unilever.
A further example of the secondments leveraging thematic programme capacity was that in mid 2004 Shell approached IUCN with a request to establish an Independent Scientific Review Panel to provide a review of the impact of pipeline routing and construction work being carried out by Sakhalin Energy Investment Company (SEIC) developing the Sakhalin II project in the Russian North East on the critically endangered Western Gray Whale population. The Business and Biodiversity Programme worked on the establishment of the Panel mapping into the Species Survival Commission and Commission on Environmental, Economic Social Policy networks and managed the process through to the delivery of the Report and a series of follow-up workshops. Subsequently, SEIC agreed to the establishment of a more proactive Western Gray Whale Advisory Panel, the process of which was designed within BBP but handed over to the Global Marine Programme to implement and run for the 5-year contract period.
Shell and IUCN consider that their relationship has reached a point of maturity that warrants elevating it to a higher level having completed 5 years of secondments. The two organizations have therefore decided to restructure and scale up the existing relationship into a strategic collaboration that fosters greater involvement of IUCN’s component programmes (including Commissions), its membership, and its broader constituency at global and regional level as well as involving all Shell’s business divisions and their operating companies over which they have management control. Further information about the emerging relationship will be emerging soon.
In February 2008, Saskia de Koning has been seconded from Shell to IUCN for a period of two years. To build the relationship between Shell and IUCN she has three main tasks:
- Assist IUCN in improving it’s business skills through the transfer of appropriate skills from qualified Shell specialists
- Assist IUCN in developing capacity to engage more effectively with business on biodiversity issues
- Support Shell businesses in the identification of biodiversity risks to their business and provide help to address such risks through links to IUCN expertise and networks.
