It’s not just multinationals that have a role to play in addressing how business impacts nature – small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are hugely influential, too. 

Generally described as employing 250 people or less, it’s estimated that there are between 350-400 million SMEs across the world, accounting for around two thirds of all jobs. With massive combined spending power, and crucial roles in supply chains, their potential impact on nature is huge. 

While climate change and its associated greenhouse gas emissions often take center stage in corporate sustainability agendas, small management teams may find it challenging to allocate resources towards understanding their impacts on nature and biodiversity. But for the smallest SME, the benefits of taking the first steps towards creating a nature strategy can far outweigh any costs, and with a few careful considerations, it needn’t be a daunting journey, either. 

According to Ben Matthews, a Senior Manager in sustainability at PwC, for SMEs, having the perfect, third-party assured data is less important than just starting the journey, and understanding where their dependencies and opportunities are. 

“Businesses shouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to measure everything because that’s impossible – they should focus on key areas,” he says. 

“Taking a materiality-led approach is going to be really important to SMEs, given their limited time and resources. They will need to take a very targeted approach and perhaps look at a particular product that they produce or sell that has the highest impact on nature.” 

This could involve assessing the impacts of water use, or other raw materials such as foodstuffs, minerals and aggregates, and the effect of producing and mining them on nature. 

Eva Zabey, CEO of Business for Nature, suggests that businesses should leverage tools like ENCORE (Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure). The free, online platform sets out, sector-by-sector, the importance of nature to the economy, and can help organizations explore their exposure to nature-related risk and take the first steps to understand their dependencies and impacts on nature. 

Zabey also recommends that SMEs look to assign simple governance within the business and give responsibility to whoever on the executive team is most interested in the issue. They can then lead on building a team of passionate staff who can inspire and motivate others. 

Despite their size, and relative lack of resources, SMEs do have flexibility in their favor, and unlike multinationals, are unencumbered by stringent decision-making processes and shareholder demands.  

“Agility means that small businesses are very different from big corporates – you can take a decision today, and implement it tomorrow,” says Keith Mellen, a director at UK hairdressing firm Anne Veck, which committed to develop a nature strategy earlier this year. 

“To some extent, small businesses are an extension of their owners, so if they are passionate and really believe in something, within practical business limits, their business can reflect this.” 

This is also true of Woolcool, an award-winning company with 60 employees, that produces sustainable insulated packaging made from wool for the food and pharmaceutical industries. 

Nature, and sheep in particular, are integral to the business, explains Managing Director Josie Morris, who is in the early stages of a full biodiversity analysis of the business, and the positive and negative impacts of wool.

“One of the things I’ve come to realize is that there’s a lot of focus on carbon, and how businesses are managing it, but other elements of the planet, like nature, get missed,” she says. “A key challenge is that there isn’t a benchmark for measuring nature, and companies are often left working off a blank canvas.”

As a result: “Looking at biodiversity can feel like such a huge undertaking that it’s easy to push to one side; it can feel like a problem that you’re never going to solve.” 

For Morris, the answer is starting with small steps, such as going paperless in the office. “If every company did something, no matter how small, it would have a big impact,” she says. “Then, when you come to develop a full nature strategy, you’ve already got that foundation there.” 

Reporting on the impacts a business has on nature can bring a competitive advantage too, as more multinationals are asking suppliers about their ESG commitments. 

Adele Cheli, Sustainability Partnerships and Strategy Director at GSK explains that: “A lot of SMEs are in supply chains, so I think it’s fundamental that everybody plays their role. And bigger businesses such as GSK can only achieve their own nature goals if our supply chain gets on board.” 

“Of course there are resource constraints, so SMEs need to focus on the activities that are really going to move the dial and are relevant and material to them. But there’s a huge opportunity for small companies to have a big impact.” 

“It’s vitally important that small business take all the action they can to become more nature and climate friendly,” agrees Mellen. But he also suggests that if a big corporate is asking its suppliers to meet certain environmental criteria, then the onus is on them to provide some form of help and support. 

SMEs can also get on the front foot and become early adopters and capture market share, says Morris. “From a product perspective, looking at our impacts on nature puts us ahead of other companies which, at some stage, will have to do the same thing,” she explains. 

Working for a business with a purpose is also important to a lot of potential employees, and there’s the attraction that companies that are more conscious about the environment care more about their people, too.

“We definitely get more buy-in from the team for being a sustainability-orientated company and people want to work for us because of that, which is a big plus for any SME,” she adds.

Businesses can find out more about how to develop and submit their nature strategy by using the Nature Strategy Handbook, a step-by-step guide on how to develop a nature strategy.