Conservation and Business Need to Learn to Talk to Each Other

This communication gap is slowing efforts to protect the planet.

Sophia Wood
6 min readOct 20, 2021
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Like two bickering brothers, the worlds of conservation and business depend on each other, but can never seem to reach a consensus about how to cooperate. Even as massive financiers like Blackrock add environmental targets to ESG risk requirements for investments, the fact remains that 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global carbon emissions. That number is a hard pill to swallow for those on the other side that dedicate their lives to protecting and preserving our threatened planet.

At the same time, conservationists, scientists, and NGOs have become more attuned to a need for market-based solutions that will create long-term income streams for their projects. And given a shifting global concern about the imminent impacts of climate change, philanthropists and investors are turning their heads toward the world of conservation, looking for investment-worthy projects, which explains a shift from grant-focused funding to due diligence usually reserved for venture capital investment.

In a nutshell, these seemingly separate circles are becoming a Venn diagram. And while the overlapping space is growing — and holds enormous potential for more — there is still a fundamental gap in understanding between both camps that slows communication and kills joint projects. Having worked for both sides — and in between — I can see how communication failures on an individual level are blocking progress and collaboration across industry lines.

Here are three ways industry leaders in business and conservation fail to understand each other, and how proper communication can help move the needle on protecting our planet.

1. You can’t optimize the environment.

As natural spaces on Earth dwindle, conservation efforts have been pushed into ever-smaller areas, often focused on ‘biodiversity hotspots’ — where there are more species of wildlife in a more concentrated zone. Usually found in the tropics, these hotspots are often protected for one economic reason and one scientific one; 1) you optimize the number of species you can protect through a single investment, and 2) these areas genuinely carry enormous importance for the environment as massive carbon sinks, homes to the majority of Earth’s genetic diversity (including lots of species living only in tiny niches in these areas), and managers of the planet’s weather system.

And while it feels good to protect a high diversity of wildlife, the scarcity of capital going toward conservation and climate adaptation (especially as compared to the amount going to their causes!) means equally important areas with a lower concentration of species are often overlooked. Large deserts, rocky coastal areas, dry forests, high plateaus, and wetlands also play critical roles in protecting wildlife; in fact, many of these areas serve as breeding grounds for the very birds that attract so many people to tropical forests.

An ornithologist I deeply admire once asked her students to look at the forest around her and decide which piece to destroy for a parking lot: the flooded portion or the solid ground? Taking into consideration the construction challenges and the species dependent on each habitat, the votes were split. She went on to explain how little we know about how species were using each of these areas, meaning that paving over even one could leave a vulnerable population doomed.

For this very reason, scientists often struggle to communicate how to truly protect species, realizing that they usually have to make impossible decisions about which habitats to save when finances are limited. How to counteract this tendency to view habitats as optimizable assets? Support conservationists in finding the areas under the highest threat — deserts from mining, cloud forests from palm oil, coastlines from tourism, etc — and fund long-term programs for their protection. This includes paying scientists and local communities a living wage for the work of studying and conserving the area.

2. Local people must be the biggest benefactors.

Following the above note, local communities — who are often indigenous owners of the land — play the most critical role in conserving our remaining wildlife and natural areas. A 2016 article in Nature (summarized here) notes that the most significant threats to wildlife extinctions are agriculture, hunting, unsustainable fishing, and logging, leading to habitat loss. This finding means that the people living in and around areas to be conserved must be compensated for not hunting, fishing, or otherwise living off their land for conservation efforts to be successful.

Numerous misled efforts have been made to remove communities from their land for the sake of ‘environmental protection,’ often turning locals into poachers when they lose a previously sustainable source of protein. And while the conservation industry is slowly incorporating communities into projects, there has not yet been a clear shift in mentality from businesses looking to get involved in environmental efforts, whether philanthropically or as an investment. After all, bringing more stakeholders into the project often makes it more expensive — so less appealing for potential backers.

But investing in local communities’ to access basic utilities (schools, food security, healthcare) really is the most effective strategy toward protecting wildlife and natural ecosystems.

3. Carbon neutrality ≠ sustainability.

Large companies in every industry have made waves over the past two years declaring a mission to become “carbon neutral.” In short, this means removing as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as they emit, which requires a combination of:

  1. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible by making processes more efficient and less wasteful.
  2. Offsetting the remaining emissions (because no one can truly hit zero while still operating a massive international company) by purchasing carbon credits, equal to one ton of carbon sequestered (removed) from the atmosphere or avoided from being emitted. This is where things get hairy.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article about the opacity of the voluntary carbon offset market and how many carbon credits on the market today come from activities that don’t actively draw carbon out of the atmosphere (eg renewable energy credits). The cheapest carbon credits available on the market ($1–2 for one ton of carbon offset) come from these renewable projects under the argument that the energy produced from wind turbines/solar panels/hydropower etc prevents carbon from being emitted to make the same energy from fossil fuels.

While this fact may be true, it is not clear that purchasing these credits effectively diminishes a person or company’s carbon footprint because renewable energy credits may lack something called “additionality.” Additionality is a fancy term used in the carbon world to answer the question: “would this project have happened — aka is it financially viable — without selling carbon credits to fund it?” And for many renewable energy projects, the answer is: yes. Therefore, the payment from one of these companies is not directly contributing to the removal — or avoidance — of greenhouse gases.

As a result, these actions by big companies, even when well-intentioned, often come across as greenwashing to conservationists. In fact, the voluntary carbon market has become so massive and financial that it often feels completely disparate from the worlds of scientists and indigenous communities working amongst the forests in question. That being said, voluntary carbon standards are already being revised and standardized by the world’s largest certification bodies to provide clarity about what truly constitutes an offset. However, companies looking to genuinely leave a positive impact will need to look beyond carbon (whether heading for neutral or negative) and consider how their actions protect ecosystems, biodiversity, and indigenous livelihoods, all of which contribute to global climate resilience.

In my experience working with both business and conservation groups, there is often more in common than each party thinks. However, there is a clear lacuna largely created by communication barriers and ways of seeing the world that often halt cooperation before it can even begin.

My two cents: scientists need to start thinking more in terms of finding solutions once problems are identified (move faster) and business needs to learn to understand a problem more fully before acting (move slower).

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Sophia Wood

Working to make conservation profitable *and* sexy.