IUCN and Nespresso have worked together since 2010. Their current three-year agreement runs until 2021. The overall purpose of the partnership is to address the company’s impacts and dependencies on biodiversity by helping to improve its business resilience and align its supply chain practices with ecological planetary boundaries and community needs.
The IUCN-Nespresso agreement has the following objectives:
- Advising on the company’s biodiversity impact reporting framework.
- Deploying integrated landscape management approaches in key coffee sourcing regions used by Nespresso through the establishment of collaborative platforms.
- Sharing biodiversity conservation knowledge with the company and external stakeholders, which demonstrates the important role that business plays in safeguarding nature.
As a result, Nespresso has supported the development of the new global Guidelines for planning and monitoring corporate biodiversity performance. The Guidelines were released in March 2021, ahead of the IUCN World Conservation Congress and Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of the Parties, both taking place later in 2021.
In addition, a team from IUCN worked with Nespresso staff and their partners to understand the company’s operations and projects related to coffee production and biodiversity. This collaboration led to the development of a recommended framework for the company to use when planning and monitoring its biodiversity performance, in light of its regenerative agriculture ambitions and alignment with the new IUCN Guidelines. Read more about the recommendations from this project in the report, Nespresso and Biodiversity.
Some of the previous results of this collaborative engagement include:
Initiating the now independent Aluminium Stewardship Initiative. Nespresso was one of the first companies to back the formation of a cross-sectoral coalition of companies and civil society organisations coming together to establish a performance standard for the responsible production and use of aluminium. IUCN facilitated this initial effort. Read more here. View the video.
Championing the now independent Cerrado Waters Consortium. Nespresso has been one of the key funders of an effort to bring multiple stakeholders together under this umbrella coalition with the main purpose of advancing a sustainable landscape approach in Brazil’s biodiversity-rich and water-scarce Cerrado region. Today, the consortium has grown, and now has support from multiple stakeholders in both the public and private sectors. Read more here. View the video (in Portuguese).
Proposing a Net Positive Impact (NPI) for biodiversity approach in a coffee landscape. This work contributed to the report, No Net Loss and Net Positive Impact: Approaches for Biodiversity, which finds that under certain conditions, applying No Net Loss (NNL) and Net Positive Impact (NPI) approaches to agriculture and forestry landscapes associated with companies’ operations and supply chains could have a greater impact in reducing biodiversity loss than in other sectors. Read more here.
Contributing to a country-level case study on the Natural Capital Protocol. Nespresso explored the enabling conditions required for using the Natural Capital Protocol in value chains, including the links between government, finance, business and civil society in integrating natural capital in its decisions. The company joined Colombian-based firms, academia and government along with representatives from IUCN, the International Finance Corporation, World Bank and others to identify natural capital issues in the coffee sector and how this impacts multinational value chains. Read more here.
