Collaborating on Natural Capital

| Josh Henretig

greenleafMicrosoft greatly values partnerships and recognizes that, particularly in areas that have a global impact like environmental sustainability, collaborative efforts are essential to having a greater lasting impact. Tomorrow at the GreenBiz Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona, Microsoft will join others in launching the Natural Capital Business Hub, an online platform that will help facilitate collaboration between diverse companies on natural capital issues.

Microsoft will join more than 40 leading companies in being featured on this collaborative space. Other companies participating in the hub include Disney, Coca-Cola, Dell and many others. The Natural Capital Business Hub aims to enable greater “followership” throughout the business community and aggregate impacts of projects that are underway. In addition, it will help create a way forward for scalable restoration and protection of natural systems that are vital to sustainable business and economic success.

The Natural Capital Business Hub will be an open and dynamic platform that’s working to help diverse companies at varying stages of maturity on natural capital issues to evaluate and make the internal business case for action, learn from curated company case studies, and find peers to obtain or offer help and advice. Companies will have help in choosing appropriate action targets, frameworks, and tools to incorporate into their decision making, benchmarking against other companies and evolving best practices, and identifying high impact partners and projects for collaboration and collective action.

Microsoft’s contributions to the Business Hub include 3 “case studies,” one profiling Microsoft’s internal carbon fee, and the other two that come from Microsoft Research and are focused on ecosystem modeling, and using information technology to identify ways to conserve the greatest number of plant species by protecting small landmasses.

The Business Hub is a collaborative project developed by the Corporate Eco Forum and The Nature Conservancy, and supported by the Natural Capital Coalition (formerly The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Business Coalition), in consultation with a vast array of business and NGO leaders. Tata Consultancy Services is providing in-kind technical and analytical support to build the Hub, as their contribution to furthering the uptake of natural capital accounting.

I will be at the GreenBiz Forum this week and will be speaking on Wednesday, February 19 at 3:00pm to discuss employee engagement—if you’re attending GreenBiz this year, I hope to see you there! We will also be sharing highlights from the GreenBiz Forum on Twitter, which you can follow @microsoft_green.

You can read more about the Natural Capital Business Hub here, and be sure to check out their website here.

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