In this new series of interviews, we speak to four businesses about their experiences of taking part in It’s Now for Nature Accelerator programs, and how it has supported their journey toward publishing a nature strategy.  

Luxembourg-based Jan De Nul is a major global infrastructure company working on water, land and in energy. The family-owned business employs over 8,000 people. 

Here, Pauline Herpels, the business’s acting sustainability manager, explains why the company signed up to The Biodiversity Shift, an It’s Now for Nature Accelerator co-hosted by The Shift and WWF Belgium, and how it has helped them to move beyond theory, and take the steps needed to create a nature strategy for the business. 

In 2023, we published our Biodiversity and Ecosystems Policy, which kick-started our thinking on the need to embed nature into our wider business strategy. Our policy was driven by a commitment to increase our positive contribution at both local and global scale and recognize the importance of an integrated approach to tackling climate change and minimizing biodiversity loss. But we faced challenges turning this ambition into a practical strategy. There was no single, unified metric for nature, nor a standard and widely accepted framework. It was also difficult to balance our global corporate guidance with the reality that nature-related impacts and dependencies are highly location-specific.  

We then moved to developing a strategy that would bring the policy to life. However, nature is such a connected topic linking climate, pollution and circularity, with a crucial social aspect, too. We felt a bit lost, so the Biodiversity Shift, an It’s Now for Nature Accelerator, came at the right time to put our thinking into action.  

We already knew we were making nature-positive decisions every day, but these efforts were often ad hoc and unconnected. We wanted the strategy to change that, to guide us in a clear direction. 

That’s where the Accelerator delivered its first big lesson – don’t procrastinate, just get started. There’s no point waiting for someone to tell you how to do it because there isn’t a perfect template, and every company is different. 

It was important to link the nature strategy to the company’s goals and ambitions too, because that ensured it didn’t just appear out of the blue; it gave it continuity and structure, and colleagues knew it was something that had backing in the boardroom. 

Getting our colleagues on board was an important part of the whole process. The Nature Strategy Handbook played an important role in this. It’s short and to the point, and through the Access, Commit, Transform, Disclose (ACT-D) framework, it offered a clear step-by-step guide that I could use to explain how and why we were integrating nature into the business. 

We developed a strategy aligned with our activities and targets at both project and corporate level. This helped us to streamline our efforts and better monitor and measure our impacts. 

We will publish our strategy later this year and submit it to It’s Now for Nature. By making our approach transparent, we are taking responsibility, as well as setting measurable targets and providing clear visibility on our progress to stakeholders. 

We have noticed a significant increase in detailed sustainability-related questions from clients. Managing impacts on nature is becoming an important pillar of many projects, so having a strong policy in place has definitely been a benefit when it comes to tendering for contracts. 

We have a dedicated team of in-house experts who develop and implement nature-based solutions. We integrate these solutions into our projects and actively propose them to our clients, helping them reduce their environmental impact while creating long-term value.  

For instance, working with the Benin government in West Africa, we built an underwater breakwater that was inspired by nature. As well as protecting the country’s Atlantic coastline from erosion, the reef-like design is now a thriving ecosystem full of corals, sponges and fish.  

Across our portfolio are long-term maintenance contracts to dredge ports and keep them operational. Traditionally, we remove the silt from the channels, taking it to designated dumping areas, then sailing back to repeat the process – that’s a lot of emissions and potential impacts on biodiversity.  

In Ecuador however, we’ve taken a different approach. While maintaining the access channel to the port of Guayaquil, we worked with partners to build a 50-hectare mangrove island – AquaForest – from locally dredged material. This project connects nature restoration to one of our key activities. The circular use of dredged material also adds an economic advantage, making this type of nature-based solution economically feasible, too. 

We have also started using the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT), something that the Accelerator introduced us to, which helps us assess potential biodiversity risks on a new project and take mitigative actions. As the tool is widely recognized by financial institutions and insurers, it provides a common framework for discussing outcomes and implications.  

We use the tool as an initial screening step before conducting a more detailed study. It allows us to quickly identify key opportunities and potential risks, ensuring subsequent analyses are  focused and efficient. By thinking about nature and biodiversity early , we can help achieve a win for the client, for us and for nature.  

There were several other elements of the Accelerator that stood out. I thought the fact that we were given homework before each session was a great idea! Everyone’s busy but if you give up a whole day to attend an event, then it’s important that you get as much out of it as possible. 

Having homework meant that people came prepared; they’d thought about the topic beforehand, so we could take a deep dive into the subject right from the start. 

The networking element was fantastic, too. We operate in a small sector with just a handful of key businesses; it’s easy to stay locked inside your own bubble. The Accelerator changed this by creating a safe environment where we could talk openly and freely and find out what other companies were doing. 

I soon discovered that companies from completely different sectors were dealing with the same issues as us. I remember hearing how businesses had convinced their own management when it came to pushing the value of having a nature strategy, and the arguments and the language that they’d used. That proved incredibly useful when it came to talking to my senior managers and directors. 

One other point on structure I liked was the way different Accelerator sessions were hosted by different participants. Having over 30 people from different companies visit us raised awareness of what we were doing; people were inquisitive and wanted to find out more. 

As we’ve created our nature strategy, what’s become clear is that our focus on nature-based solutions, on climate adaption, on biodiversity and habitat restoration isn’t a top-down thing that’s come from management. It’s something that has come from colleagues, permeated through the company and into the boardroom. 

So, while management needs to approve the ideas, they understand that it’s teams working closely on projects who know what’s possible and where improvements can be made. Harnessing that passion and expertise has been essential. 

The Accelerator helped us to create our strategy, but that’s not the end, it’s just the start, and we know we need to keep improving year-on-year. 

To find out more about the current series of Accelerators, visit: https://nowfornature.org/accelerators/