What can we learn from Accelerator hosts who are supporting businesses to develop nature strategies?

Since launching earlier this year, the It’s Now for Nature Accelerators are now in full swing with seven programs underway. In the first of two new articles, we take a closer look at how our partners’ tailor-made ‘host’ programs are helping organizations take credible action for nature, whilst building resilience and uncovering new opportunities for organizational transformation.

All Accelerators are run and hosted by a partner of Business for Nature. So far seven partner organizations (Business for Biodiversity Ireland, MVO Nederland, The Shift and WWF, UN Global Compact, WBCSD, Tandem Global and Innovate4Nature) are hosting It’s Now for Nature Accelerator programs (the Accelerators) to support a range of businesses, in multiple sectors and at different stages of their nature journeys, to create credible nature strategies.

These strategies will then be submitted to Business for Nature for inclusion in the It’s Now for Nature campaign. Lasting up to a year and spread over a number of sessions – either online or face-to-face – the Accelerators are helping businesses find solutions to some of the biggest challenges to developing a strategy, from lack of senior buy-in, to difficulties assessing a relationship with nature.

The Accelerators are based around the Nature Strategy Handbook, and its Access, Commit, Transform, Disclose (ACT-D) format, but hosts also have the flexibility to structure the Accelerator around the needs of the businesses they are working with.

Nurturing cross-sector collaboration through Nature Accelerators

In Belgium, for instance, The Shift has teamed up with WWF-Belgium to host an Accelerator – The Biodiversity Shift. The Biodiversity Shift goes beyond the theory and helps companies take structural steps and contribute towards a nature-positive future.

The Accelerator involves businesses from multiple sectors, in response to members’ requests, explains Bart Corijn, a change facilitator at The Shift. “When you work in a multi-sector context, participants get to hear things they weren’t aware of because normally they only talk to their peers. Now, all of a sudden, they are confronted with people who look at things totally differently,” he says.

MVO Nederland is a sustainable business network of more than 2,000 companies in the Netherlands, which has also chosen to run an Accelerator with a mixture of businesses including a major logistics company, supermarket chain and a firm of infrastructure engineers. “All their impacts are very different,” says Alinde Bensdorp, a project manager at MVO, “and being cross-sector means that companies can learn a lot from each other.”

Both MVO and The Biodiversity Shift also ran initial pre-Accelerator taster sessions – workshops that focused on introducing nature and biodiversity and their importance to the business. These precursor sessions built a base knowledge that could then be followed by a series of sessions and deep-dive workshops as part of the Accelerator, with many facilitated by knowledge partners and nature experts.

Maturity matters

A third Accelerator, run by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), is taking more of an international perspective, working with a group of 28 companies, split into three cohorts: one focussed on energy, another on consumer goods and retail, and the final one is cross sector.

As well as the type of business, where the companies are in their nature journey is also an important driver for how the Accelerator is pitched, explains Nadine McCormick, senior manager, Nature Action at WBCSD. “What companies are looking for is different, depending on their maturity,” she says. “Our Accelerator includes companies that are already well into their nature strategy journeys, so it is important to gear the content towards them.”

Discussions have covered broad topics such as internal buy-in and governance structures, she explains, but they have also moved on to specifics such as financial assessment of impacts, or at a particular commodity in the supply chain.

“It’s very impactful to bring a group of members together to work on a similar challenge and then share lessons with each other, with a very action-orientated lens in mind,” she says.

Nature Strategy Handbook provides structure to businesses’ ambition

For many of the companies involved with The Biodiversity Shift, major frameworks such as the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) are too ambitious, explains Corjin, with many members still exploring where they are in terms of nature, and what they should do next.

To get started, they turned to the Nature Strategy Handbook which offered them the structure, ambition and accessibility that they were looking for. “It gave us an umbrella to work under but also the flexibility we needed to tailor the content to our businesses,” he says.

“Our role is to help filter out things that aren’t relevant for the businesses,” says Titus Ghyselinck, program manager for business engagement at WWF-Belgium. “We show companies the key things they need to know to build a strategy, and the Handbook gives us the structure to do that – it stops you getting lost in this enormous landscape of different actors, acronyms, tools and initiatives. It’s a good compass to get you going.

“They still need to do the work and translate it to their companies, but I think we give them a backbone.”

Where all three hosts align is the need to offer a pre-competitive space, held under Chatham House rules and where participants are free to speak.

At The Biodiversity Shift, there is an emphasis that this is a closed community, and that nothing should be shared outside the group without approval. “We make sure that this confidentiality is closely guarded,” says Corijn.

“They wanted a safe space to talk, and to come together with their peers,” says McCormick. “It’s important that people feel able to share.”

In our next article, we explore the benefits of what the companies  – and the hosts – gain from taking part in the It’s Now for Nature Accelerators.