Carbone, Giulia

Achieving a climate-resilient future requires rapid, sustained and far-reaching transformations in energy, land-use, infrastructure and industrial systems. Large-scale expansion of renewable energy can play a critical role in meeting the world’s growing energy demands and in the fight against climate change. However, even ‘clean’ energy sources can have significant unintended impacts on the environment.

Investing in nature and Nature-based Solutions is an important pathway to address the current ecological crisis. The loss of biodiversity, with around one million animal and plant species threatened with extinction, is putting at risk our economies, livelihoods, food security, health, and quality of life worldwide. Diverse and innovative measures are needed to reverse this decline and to restore healthy ecosystems.

Businesses are seeking biodiversity indicators to help assess performance for a variety of business applications to address a range of internal and external drivers. However, challenges exist to develop indicators that can cut through the complexity of natural systems, display clear and simple measures of biodiversity, and be relevant to different business applications.

This report outlines the advances made by IUCN's Global Business and Biodiversity Programme in working with business to further global conservation goals — from helping develop Holcim’s Biodiversity Management System to bringing the business voice to CBD negotiations. IUCN also scaled up its influence with the private sector through new engagements with Nespresso, Rio Tinto and Tata Steel Thailand.

The aim of this study is to examine the gaps in our understanding of how tourism development affects natural World Heritage Sites in order to support the development of sustainable tourism these sites.

The report reflects the progress made by BBP in 2008.

The report reflects the progress made by BBP last year. The stories selected are a balanced representation of BBP's work in 2009 to deliver the IUCN programme for 2009-2012. Intrinsically linked to biodiversity are four of humankind's greatest challenges and the four focus areas of the IUCN programme: climate change, energy, livelihoods and economics. The performance assessment at the end of the report shows progress against the planned annual results.