Frontrunners integrate organizations to mainstream biodiversity into financial and sustainability materiality issues as well as into transformative change goals. Their influence goes beyond an individual organization’s strategic commitment toward nature positive. Foresight analysis helps organizations to navigate in a changing operating environment. What if questions are typical in strategic foresight exercises, and they widen the radar for possible futures that frontrunners can encounter.
Frontrunners in biodiversity footprinting run several fronts
CircHive project (2022-2027) brings together research, practice and case study partners to test and develop approaches to integrate biodiversity and the value of nature into economic decision making. Work is organized in sectoral hubs in Biomaterials, Food & Retailers, Investors, and Green Cities.
Based on an analysis in progress in CircHive, frontrunners’ ambitions range from assessing and mitigating the risks caused by nature to rethinking the operations on and with nature. Integrating biodiversity and natural capital into decision making through risk & opportunity (R/O) assessments, then extending attention to impacts, risks & opportunities (IRO), and further, to dependencies, impacts, risks & opportunities (DIRO) is a radical change in business thinking.
Frontrunners that pilot biodiversity footprinting methods integrate organizations to make sense of the uncertainties related to nature. Their analyses extend from the economic value of current risks (financial materiality) to capture the future risks and opportunities (sustainability materiality) that consider wider spatial and temporal horizons as well as stakeholders involved.
An evolving landscape opens up: Transformative changes are not linear, but there are complex interconnected forces in process for multiple directions. For example, the institutional and governance drivers for biodiversity change have shifted from a regulatory push to voluntary market action and initiatives. In policy making and markets, there are several ideas of the preferred future. Nature positive emerges with circular bioeconomy, regenerative economy, and clean, green, digital and just futures in the making.
Foresight uses What if questions to rehearse for possible futures
Strategic foresight is a systematic analysis of trends, drivers, change factors and signals of changes. Before setting the target for a shared vision of the preferred future, designing the roadmap and optimizing the way forward, alternative future scenarios are tested with “What if” questions.
Such questions can be defined from weak signals, disruptions and possible surprises:
Will there be return to the “future as it used to be” after the current disruptions?
Frontrunners have their attention on current disruptions, geopolitics, and uncertainties. Environmental risks have not disappeared; they have less urgency on the policy and law makers agendas. Yet, unconventional questions have suddenly become realistic to ask: What if oil markets were disrupted, not for a few months, but for several decades? What if global value chains were replaced with local sourcing to secure adaptive place-based systems? What if the impact of consumption choices was directly visible in one’s own environment, nature in my backyard, too? What if nature became the critical infrastructure?
How long will the past forecasts remain valid?
Frontrunners’ understanding about their sustainability material issues, i.e., future risks and opportunities, leans on past trends, drivers and change factors, such as market trends, technology forecasts, and resource outlooks. Even the "transformative change" is difficult to think of beyond today’s assumptions. Yet, there are also signals that challenge the past forecasts. The Club of Rome highlights recent analysis by system scientist Ugo Bardi who argues that global population trends could bend downwards much sooner than expected. The question they ask is not about the global value chains, markets or substitution strategies; it’s about governments’ ability to sustain democratic systems, ensure citizens’ health and wellbeing, and rethink the economic system. What if value of nature was to be captured with other than economic parameters?
Can we count on science fiction to remain fiction?
Ideas of an industrial revolution that would integrate digital, physical, and biological systems into connected, automated industrial processes are tested by the frontrunners, too. The speed of nature positive turn can surprise us. It did not take long that environmental AI turned from a fix-for-all solution to concern about the impacts of AI on nature and people. Recent environmental horizon scanning reports ask the question differently: what if both boom and doom are in the making simultaneously, and with AI we have opportunity to go either way much faster. Overall, do we have imagination for a science fiction: What if AI did not run on our cognitive data for large language models, but the mycorrhizas under our feet, algorithms written on ecosystems, habitats, communities, and genes?
Without claiming that any of the above developments will take place, or would even be likely to happen, the What if questions trigger curiosity. Can we imagine the world after the current disruptions? Can we think of the nature positive as something else than how we think of it today? What does it mean when nature is considered critical infrastructure for a company, for a city or for national security? How would such starting point change the institutional and governance systems that drive biodiversity change for better, not worse?
It is an evolving landscape – so, now what?
What if questions are not meant to make us foresee the future with more clarity. Rehearsing with ideas of possible futures, however, can change what we see possible today and how we act upon these observations.
Strategic foresight promotes organizations to think of systems in a changing world. The preferred future unfolds with yet unrecognized negative externalities, and vice versa, even the worst-case scenarios reveal possible positive externalities. Uncertainties invite more experimentation to strengthen the preferred future pathway.
The frontrunners testing biodiversity footprinting methods improve understanding about their dependencies, impacts and/or risks on nature. The choices that the frontrunners make when dealing with uncertainties contribute to system changes beyond their own organizational boundaries. Learning to measure biodiversity to monitor change in nature, and act for nature, reveals challenges which no organization, economic sector or region can manage alone. Transition pathways and transformative change goals necessitate collaborative imagination in preparing for multiple possible futures.
This text is based on an analysis in progress in CircHive project about the evolving landscape of the frontrunners mainstreaming biodiversity into sustainability strategies. Data is collected from frontrunner interviews, sustainability reports and recent foresight/horizon scanning reports. Project deliverable is expected for publication in 2027.
For further information, see the article What do we think about futures in the CircHive project? | CircHive or contact: paivi.pelli (at) efi.int
