How to: work with nature to create business value and impact
By Mairead Cahill for Ethos magazine: issue 15| October 2021
Wonderoom works with pioneering leaders and brands to create and communicate nature-led solutions that generate value for people, the natural world, and business. Founder Mairead Cahill shares five benefits to a business in taking a nature-led approach.
The natural world is 4.5bn years old. Modern humans are around 200,000 years old. While nature isn’t the panacea to all our problems, she is our greatest and most under-utilised ally in tackling the ecological and climate crises, and in creating valuable and sustainable businesses fit for the future.
Taking a nature-led approach — working with and for nature to create value — holds the potential to deliver multiple benefits for your business. It can helping you achieve climate and net zero goals, develop desirable and regenerative products and services, positively engage people and customers, build greater resilience in your supply chain, and reduce costs.
Now is the time to get on the front foot in thinking about your relationship to nature and the opportunities and risks it presents to your business. We explore five benefits in doing so below.
1. Achieve your net zero goals
Businesses are increasingly committing to ‘net zero’ — which, put simply, means achieving an overall balance between emissions produced and emissions taken out of the atmosphere of the earth, by your business. If done right, incorporating a nature-led approach can help a business achieve its net-zero goals — in addition to delivering broader nature and biodiversity benefits. The primary focus in achieving net zero needs to be strong reductions in your carbon emissions. Nature-led thinking can contribute towards that through regenerative design of low carbon products and services, and supply chain.
Alongside carbon reductions, businesses can compensate or offset emissions through investment in natural climate solutions to conserve, restore and manage natural ecosystems on land and sea. Done the right way, these investments can support net zero goals, generate biodiversity benefits, economic benefits to local communities, and strengthen the resilience of a business’s supply chain. Along with the credibility and quality of the nature-based solutions selected, we also consider how it aligns to your operational presence, capabilities and footprint. For example, opportunities to add value within your sphere of impact, influence and operations, rather than offsetting that is disconnected from who you are and what you do.
2. Develop regenerative offers to grow your business
One of the defining characteristics of nature is that nothing is ever wasted, it just changes form. This is a design principle we can take into business. As we move into a greater understanding of the value and fragility of our natural world, we see more opportunities for imagination in designing products that work with and for nature. From selection of natural materials, harmonising the impact of a product on nature while it is in use, end of life repurposing, and decomposing to create minimal damage or even regenerative value to the natural world.
Designing with nature holds potential to develop products and services that are substantially lower in carbon, more resilient, in some cases lower cost, and more desirable to customers. While this is particularly pertinent in the food and fashion industries — given their sheer volume of impact on nature — every business can work with nature to create value. Opportunities range from inspiration at product and service design stage, to your selection of materials, how customers engage with your product or services, ways to reduce waste and increase efficiency, and end of life opportunities to upcycle and repurpose.
3. Inspire and engage your teams and customers
Employees and customers are looking for credible and inspiring action on nature and climate as an increasingly important driver of purchase and choice of employer. Unlike carbon, humans have a visceral connection to nature that is directly experienced — touched, seen, heard and felt. This presents opportunities in two ways. Firstly, by creating and powerfully communicating nature and biodiversity-based initiatives and impact you’re significantly engaged with and contributing towards to customers and employees. Secondly, in creating opportunities for engagement with nature for your people — both as a source of inspiration and wellbeing and an opportunity for them to be part of creating positive impact and change.
4. Manage supply chain risks and costs
The climate and ecological crises are directly impacting the price, quality and access to natural resources and raw materials used by business. This is only set to sharply increase. Taking a forward-looking approach to where you source your materials from, and how, gives an opportunity to reflect on ways to both reduce your footprint, risks and costs, increase resilience, and create positive impact — both in terms of how you work with natural resources, and the local people and communities you engage with and impact through your supply chain.
5. Get ahead of nature-related regulation
Nature and biodiversity is following in the footsteps of carbon, with increasing financial and legal regulation coming into play. This will impact the pricing and reporting of natural resources, with business increasingly held to account for its impact. Rather than waiting for these to come into force, you can get on the front foot now by understanding and managing their use and impact on natural resources, leading to greater efficiency and cost reduction.
How do you take this forward?
The key is to identify and focus on the areas for your greatest impact. The way we approach this with a brand or business is to first look at the opportunities and risks that nature and biodiversity present to them, based on who they are and what they do. We then develop nature-led solutions in their areas of greatest opportunity to add value for people, climate and biodiversity, and their business. Lastly, we look at how to powerfully communicate and engage their people and customers on the impact that they are creating together. We’ve created The Greenhouse as a space to support leaders and brands to radically reimagine and rebuild their relationship to nature, and grow nature-led solutions that add real value for people, climate and biodiversity, and business.
Mairead Cahill is the founder of Wonderoom. Wonderoom works with pioneering leaders and brands to create extraordinary impact for nature, people and business, and powerfully engage teams, customers and audiences on the journey. For more, visit www.wonderoom.co.
