Business and Enterprise benefiting nature – The meaning

A business, enterprise or other commercial activity, that primarily depends on and actively benefits nature or promotes nature awareness.

Why not just say Nature Based Business?

There isn’t a single definition of a NBB which has not proven to be a very useful term in itself. Definitions that exist sound good until you try and actually apply them in practice and numerous ‘grey areas’ emerge.

One example is of a ‘definition’ is:

Any commercial activity that can generate economic or social benefits in a way that supports one or more meaningful nature conservation outcomes.

Just rolls of the tongue doesn’t it?!

The Nearly Wild take on Nature Based Business

There are a number of important considerations which we have tried to encapsulate in our guidance statement. These include:

  • It is not just about use but about positive benefit to nature.
  • Its is about active / deliberate action to benefit nature, preferably as part of the business DNA, not an add.
  • This includes third sector/charitable/social enterprise.

So, we looked at that and tested it here in Wales in practice, which led to us revising it to:

A business, enterprise or other commercial activity, that primarily depends on and actively benefits nature or promotes nature awareness.

Shortened to…

Business and enterprise actively benefiting nature.

We don’t treat this as definition but rather as a guide. Our experience of working with certification and definitions is that it is too filled with nuances that huge effort has to go into all the specifics which become cumbersome to work with and eventually can lead down rabbit holes. It is about as much about ethos, principle and how you do something as what you do.

So taking that to the next level, we have found that the following basic categories work really well:

Important in all of these is the deliberate decision to support wildlife / nature / etc, rather than passive reaction to a situation which is not embedded in the business core values.

Nature Based Business – direct benefit to nature

  • Directly harvest / manage a resource

Nature Benefitting Business –indirect benefit to nature

  • Use the resource (therefore influence resource management / harvest but don’t actually harvest directly themselves)
  • Use the resource to raise awareness and educate about nature
  • Support those producing nature friendly product through deliberate support as part of the supply chain

Just to re-iterate, for all of them it is about deliberate action to support nature.

We have now come up with about 80 examples of business types than can be nature benefitting depending on how they are run.

We have also produced a draft benchmarking tool which we are now trialling further.

There is of course rather more to this I am afraid but I hope that gives a good starting point.