Make Nature Your Business
COMPANIES are being told to take a hard look at what they can do for New Zealand’s struggling biodiversity – because it’s good for business. It’s all about the new “restoration economy”, says Waikato University Institute for Business Research Associate Dean Eva Collins.
“In the United States, what they’re now calling the Restoration Economy is worth $25 billion and creates 25 million jobs,” she said.
Collins is part of a research programme at the university looking at how native biodiversity can be improved in cities.
But while her colleagues in the science faculty are looking at the physical aspects of bringing native plants, birds and insects back to the cities, Collins is all about business.
Well-Being
“It’s not going to happen without business,” she told Carbon News. “Business has to be there, because it’s got the resources.”
And if it’s got any sense, it also wants to be there, she says.
“Being out in nature helps to restore our psychological well-being, it increases our focus and I think about what (the late New Zealand physicist, Professor Sir) Paul Callaghan said about how we want New Zealand to be the place where talent wants to come to live,” she said.
“That’s really what the Department of Conservation is also working for – the ‘greatest living space on Earth’. That’s where talent will want to come to live.”
Collins says that businesses are starting to understand the value in getting involved in environmental projects, especially as they start looking at the Sustainable Development Goals, and at the implications of climate change for New Zealand.
Real Impacts
“If you’re in the insurance industry, having healthy mangrove and wetland systems there to reduce flooding is of material benefit to you,” she said.
“We all saw what happened in the Edgecumbe floods. The impacts on business are real. There’s a business cost when we have events like that, and a benefit when we have things like mangroves that help to reduce the impacts.”
Collins will speak about the power of cross-sector partnerships between business, not-for-profits and the government to scale up innovative biodiversity at the Biodiversity and Business - Growth for Good event at the Mission Estate Winery in Hawke’s Bay on October 9.