Meet the newest member of the board: Pongo pygmaeus.
Around a year ago, Eco-Business reported a Malaysian palm oil producer had become the world’s first company to appoint a non-human animal to its board of directors in the form of Aman the orangutan. It was an April Fools’ joke that had LinkedIn giggling. But although hosting an orangutan in the boardroom is clearly impractical, is the idea of giving nature a seat at the table really all that laughable?
Giving nature a voice
In fact, someone else had got there first. In 2022, UK-based Faith in Nature was the first company to appoint a Nature Guardian — a non-executive director with the sole responsibility of representing the natural world, non-humans and environmental interests — giving nature a voice and a vote on how the company is run. House of Hackney and the Better Business Network have since followed, while Patagonia has made nature its sole shareholder.
And back in 2008, an entire country changed its constitution to give nature protected rights, with the people of Ecuador voting overwhelmingly in favour of the move. Recent court cases have tested the country’s Rights of Nature laws, seeing the Constitutional Court ruling in favour of Ecuador’s cloud forests to prevent large-scale mining operations. Other countries have implemented similar mechanisms, including Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico. A constitutional amendment, currently in draft, would add Aruba to the list of countries starting to formally recognise nature’s legal rights.
Some countries have gone a step further by granting “personhood” to specific natural entities, such as the Muteshekau-shipu or Magpie river in Canada and the Whanganui River in New Zealand. More recently, whales were recognised as legal persons in a treatysigned by Indigenous leaders of the Cook Islands, Tahiti and New Zealand.
Is all this really necessary?
From early environmental movements to present day organisations such as ClientEarth, many don’t see the idea of sticking up for nature as radical, but as essential to the long-term wellbeing of people and the planet. The very idea of having to formally represent nature and its rights might seem odd to those communities and cultures for whom it simply makes sense to respect and protect the natural world which provides us with essential resources and services.
Yet it’s the systematic over-exploitation of these resources that has started to make such representation seem necessary. And regardless of whether you believe it’s the right thing to do or a vital response to our global overshooting of planetary boundaries, failure to account for nature is starting to hit the bottom line. Pressure on corporate boards to demonstrate they are capable of understanding and overseeing sustainability issues has come on the heels of increased shareholder activism.
The recent experiences of companies such as Exxon may be a sign of things to come for others. In 2021, shareholders voted to replace three members of the energy company’s board after Hedge fund Engine No.1, which held just 0.02% of Exxon Mobil’s stock, convinced fellow shareholders that the company’s lacklustre climate strategy would leave it financially unprepared for the transition to renewable energy. A similar, more recent move by Ajruna Capital has been less successful.
Lawsuits being brought against companies in relation to sustainability matters such as climate change are also on the rise. With cases being led by human representatives including states, individuals, and third parties, nature is shouting louder to be heard. And perhaps it was always going to need the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss to be felt by a significant enough proportion of the global population for such representation to hit the mainstream.
Coordinated efforts to account for and restore nature are starting to come to fruition through initiatives such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures and Science Based Targets Network, following adoption of a global biodiversity framework and goals at COP15. Legislation is starting to wake up too, with the introduction of the UK Biodiversity Net Gain planning regulations, and relevant reporting requirements through the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. And could longstanding academic efforts to assign economic value to ecosystems services start to find application with “nature pricing” following in carbon’s footprint?
Too little too late?
With increasing worldwide coordination, incoming guidance to support target setting, and pressure from multiple sides for companies to pay attention to their interconnectivity with and dependence on the natural world, the tide is shifting.
Perhaps the need to appoint a board-level representative of nature has been bypassed by external events. Or perhaps such an appointment can play a crucial role in implementation and ongoing accountability once nature-based targets are in place. Either way, this handy guide from Faith in Nature offers some pointers for those wishing to consider it, although worth also contemplating the practical challenges.
Robyn Eckersley concludes in her chapter on representing nature from The Future of Representative Democracy: “Whenever we represent nature, we, unwittingly or otherwise, also represent ourselves and the sort of world we wish to inhabit.” The collective impact and financial return of today’s efforts to represent, protect and restore nature may not be seen or understood for some time. Paying attention to the type of world we want to live in is perhaps our best call to action at this point.
And who knows, maybe it won’t be long before we’re talking about other kinds of board-level representation. Future generations perhaps, or maybe even AI…
