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Setting the New Standard: Aligning Conservation Goals with Existing Priorities

This is the seventh in a series of monthly blog posts exploring the development of a new standard in corporate conservation certification.

Last month’s blog post reflected how the world of conservation is awash in theories and stances on what is credible or not. It is also awash in objectives, priorities, plans and approaches. Every entity engaged with nature has a plan with a set of priorities, whether national or regional. Every state and territory in the U.S. has a State Wildlife Action Plan – a blueprint for securing biodiversity in the future. The EU has a biodiversity strategy for 2020, as do many countries, including Australia, Japan and Kenya. Across the NGO landscape, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) promotes its priority conservation areas, IUCN frames its work around its Red List, and BirdLife International has its Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas. At a more local scale, biodiversity and the ecological health of watersheds, estuaries, sites of significant interest and other natural areas are all addressed with suites of priorities, many supported by science and most with attendant actions. Many such plans have significant overlap, though none are universally adopted.

These plans highlight priorities, set targets and describe best practices towards meeting conservation goals. The most basic plans are informative only, while the best provide metrics, a clear picture of the desired end state, and a road map for implementation.

When Wildlife Habitat Council embarked on the re-design of its signature certification program and developed the soon-to-be-launched Conservation Certification, it took a different approach to ensure that the participants in its programs were implementing projects that met global conservation goals. Instead of creating more plans and priorities, it chose to align with existing plans and incentivize its participants to create explicit associations with them. We aligned with the wheel without reinventing it.

For WHC this approach makes a lot of sense for a variety of reasons.

WHC’s applicants – both members and not – are not conveniently located in a single conservation landscape. They cannot jointly adopt an initiative to recover a specific species, restore a regionally important ecosystem, or even focus on a single biome. To overlay a conservation priority that would have meaning for all possible locations would require that the priority be so general as to be meaningless. Instead, by aligning with existing priorities, WHC’s projects become part of the mosaic of efforts being done to advance landscape-scale conservation across the globe.

Also, having worked at the intersection of nature and business for almost three decades, WHC knows that a corporate conservation goal will only be achieved if the implementation on the ground has local meaning and significance. A narrow and specific goal that brooks no localization and allows for no real innovation will have no ownership and no longevity. Some of the strongest projects we recognize have deep meaning in their communities. By incentivizing alignments with regionally-appropriate conservation plans, WHC provides for the freedom for practitioners to find goals and priorities that are important to them, thus increasing the likelihood of success both in the near and long terms.

An additional benefit of alignments is the increase in the importance of partnerships. WHC has always valued partnerships with conservation groups that invest in on-the-ground work. By encouraging alignments with these same groups’ priorities, we increase the likelihood of successful, goal-focused partnerships.

Finally, one of the principles we adopted as we designed our new Conservation Certification was accessibility to allow projects of all shapes and sizes to receive recognition and to encourage building of successful projects. By eschewing the development of our own conservation priorities, we secure accessibility for our participants and double down on our mantra that every act of conservation matters. This approach has been designed into Conservation Certification, and an applicant will be steered towards aligning their efforts from the design phase through project maintenance and monitoring.

Under WHC’s new Conservation Certification, a program being submitted for recognition must meet a number of mandatory requirements, as follows:

Have a stated conservation or education objective
Provide value or benefit to the natural community
Have measured outcomes supported by documentation
Exceed any pertinent regulatory requirements
Be locally appropriate

These criteria introduce the concept of alignments with other conservation plans, as project owners will have to determine what is ecologically appropriate for the location and what objective would be meaningful within that context. A national conservation strategy, like the President Obama’s Pollinator Health Task Force, will provide a certain level of alignment on a broad scale, while a more local plan will be more specific with direct references to locations, partners and even plant lists. We encourage our participants to seek out the plans that are meaningful to them.

Once the criteria have been met, the applicant will be asked, for each project, to state what initiative they are aligning their goals to and how their actions are supporting them. Incentives, in the form of higher points, will be given to projects designed with explicit alignments and executed to secure them.

By not developing our own priorities but instead aligning with existing ones and leveraging existing efforts, WHC is being efficient in its approach and true to its mission and values.

Setting the New Standard: Supported Approaches Empower Success

This is the fifth in a series of monthly blog posts exploring the development of a new standard in corporate conservation certification.

It is a widely-held belief that a clinical distance must be maintained between the certifier and the certified, that one body should be the keeper of the standard and the other should be the supplicant, seeking to reach the standard through heroic, unsupported efforts. It all sounds very mythical. Imagine Greek gods up on Mount Olympus watching the efforts of mere mortals below attempting to divine the gods’ intentions and meet their capricious requirements. Distance is thought to be an essential criterion for impartiality that is itself critical for credibility.

Certifying bodies world wide take different approaches. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) states that it is committed to being the world’s leading certification program for sustainable wild-capture seafood, but it does not issue certificates or assess fisheries against its own standards. Instead it allows independently accredited bodies to certify adherence to the standards it sets. MSC takes this approach to “maintain impartiality.” The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) takes the same approach, engaging third-party entities to oversee certification of adherence to its standards.

In contrast to MSC and FSC, The Fair Trade Program and USGBC’s LEED program embrace the applicant. Fair Trade’s model is externally audited, but certification is awarded by the standard-setting body. In contrast, LEED uses transparency, clear standards and external reviewers to ensure impartiality, but provides the applicant with the information needed to compile an application—a clear view of how their efforts will be recognized and what extra efforts are needed to achieve certain levels of recognition.

In previous blog posts I talked about why our design of a new standard for corporate conservation embraces scalability and transparency as critical to accessibility and broad adoption. This post sets out an argument that a supported approach is also essential. Bringing the gods down from the mountaintop to interact with the mortals below will aid broad adoption and can be done without compromising credibility. A supported approach is essential for accessibility. It can be protected through the radical transparency designed into the program.

The Global Reporting Initiative’s Learning Services Program issued a Starting Points paper called “GRI Sustainability Reporting: How valuable is the journey?” The paper explores the experiences of organizations of all types and sizes with GRI’s reporting process. It concludes that it is not easy for those reporting for the first time to understand what the GRI sustainability reporting process involves. It also concludes that the journey towards the reporting process is crucial to the final product. Preparing an application or a report towards recognition should not be the goal. Rather, the goal should be creating sustainable projects and processes to support the application and/or report.

Just like GRI, the Wildlife Habitat Council is as interested in the journey towards certification as in the final destination. With our new standard, WHC Conservation Certification, support will be offered at a number of different points along the journey. We believe that conservation and education programs are more sustainable through an approach that considers context, encourages flexibility and embeds efficiencies through actively sharing knowledge and encouraging cross-pollination within and across industry sectors about challenges, innovations and success stories.

At the beginning of the journey, WHC seeks to work with a potential applicant to ensure they are building the strongest possible program. The British Standards Institution developed a “Guidance for Community Sustainable Development” (BS8904). This guidance could easily have been titled a “Guidance for Sustainable Corporate Conservation” given how close it hews to the decision tool WHC uses to engage the right people, at the right levels, from the right places in successful corporate conservation projects. This tool will be the first support mechanism on the journey to certification. The WHC decision tool, like BS8904, considers context as a key to success. It involves the following steps: Agreement on a Goal, Engagement of Stakeholders, Definition of Issues, Identification of Resources, Selection of Options, Implementation of Projects, Evaluation of Results, and Learning from the Process. Through this tool, WHC helps an applicant translate a corporate goal to a site-specific action and helps a corporate CSR professional translate sustainability objectives into meaningful projects.

Throughout the journey, WHC will provide guidance documents for a variety of types of conservation and education projects that an applicant can attempt. Each guidance document will contain information to allow the applicant to prepare a successful and meaningful project and prepare for certification. The guidance documents are not action plans. They do not elucidate the steps required, and adherence to them does not guarantee certification. The guidance will show the applicant what documents, data and descriptions are needed for to apply for Conservation Certification.

As the applicant completes projects and seeks to be recognized under the new standard, they will be supported throughout the application process with an online application tool that presents a series of questions walking an applicant through the activities they have implemented to improve their habitat, better manage wildlife species and educate a variety of audiences. Each applicant will have their own personal journey through the application process that will mirror their approach to project implementation but provide WHC with enough consistency and alignments to allow for effective evaluative reporting.

To ensure impartiality, WHC will separate the program support function from the certification function and govern the system to ensure that the two functions operate independently of one another. The transparency designed into the new Conservation Certification will highlight this separation and show how it is enforced.

WHC seeks to empower employees and others to implement meaningful conservation projects on corporate lands. It seeks to engage CSR professionals, Chief Sustainability Officers and EHS managers in using conservation and education to meet conservation goals that align with larger landscape efforts. Ultimately, it seeks to increase the amount of land being managed towards a conservation goal and the number of people engaged with that goal. In the world of Voluntary Sustainability Standards, WHC wants to empower, not enforce.

Setting the New Standard: Transparency Matters

This is the fourth in a series of monthly blog posts exploring the development of a new standard in corporate conservation certification.

In “Learning Through Disclosure,” an essay in Transparency in Global Environmental Governance, Graeme Auld and Lars Gulbrandsen show how two types of transparency—procedural transparency and outcome transparency—can impact the legitimacy of a recognition program. Procedural transparency focuses on governance and adjudication, providing a window into how a standard has been developed, who had a hand in developing the standard, and how the standard is defended. Outcome transparency shines a light on the activities being recognized. It holds certified entities to their stated practices and performance. When procedural transparency and outcome transparency overlap, an audience can understand the system in place for recognition and monitoring and view the level of compliance, and the standard can be considered legitimate.

There is enormous diversity in Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) across the globe from what the standards seek to recognize to the methods through which they create and evaluate their recognitions. An alphabet soup of standards is applied to forestry, fisheries, agriculture, tourism, recreation, buildings, energy and municipal policies. Some of these standards are government initiatives –the EPA Energy Star program and the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED) –others are private concerns developed by industry, civic institutions and academia. Some standards are complex and expensive, others are simple and direct. Regardless of originating entity, objective, scope or market, the one thing that successful standards share is a commitment to transparency.

In the USA and beyond, the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program shares its standards freely and openly to allow anyone to build to LEED standards, whether they seek LEED recognition or not. It also provides potential applicants for certification with a clear picture of how their efforts will score, thus providing a procedural transparency that enhances accessibility, increases uptake of the program and secures the program’s legitimacy. On the other hand, the Director General for Energy, the body that oversees the EU RED, provides information about its program on request only. In addition, RED has unclear assessment criteria, no timeline for recognition, and no clear administrative procedures for post-recognition evaluation. RED is widely perceived as being opaque and unfair.

Currently, WHC provides a measure of procedural and outcome transparency through its website and in its publications. Its members are listed, its governing board is identified and contact details and bios for all staff members are available. All certified programs are listed on the the WHC Index and details of the certification cycle are provided.

When it launches its new standard later this year, WHC will commit to radical transparency in an effort to adopt the best practices of VSS, in order to provide audiences with full and complete disclosure of procedures and outcomes, and incentivize conservation at the highest possible levels.

WHC will provide clear explanations of its new criteria. For the new standard, WHC developed a suite of Project Guidance documents that form the core content of the certification process, i.e, the objectives and project characteristics needed to reach certain levels of recognition. These documents were developed through a multi-stakeholder process that will be fully explained upon launch of the new standard. The Project Guidance documents then evolved into a series of criteria against which a project will be scored. The scoring is being developed in partnership with The Conservation Fund, and a full report on the scoring model will also be available. To facilitate consistent scoring by reviewers, the criteria have been further developed into a series of questions an applicant will be asked to answer. These questions will be freely available.

WHC will provide a clear explanation of its review process. Along with the publication of the scoring model, WHC will also provide an explanation of how each application is reviewed and the measures instituted to ensure consistency and objectivity across the entire process. Governance of the review process will also be addressed to illustrate how the integrity of the process is protected. The ability of an applicant to communicate with a reviewer will be laid out clearly, and limitations set on such communications will also be elucidated.

WHC will provide a clear explanation of the certified projects and their final scores. Currently, WHC provides descriptions of all its certified programs on the Conservation Registry. This valuable tool allows audiences to see what projects are being done where and by whom. With the new standard, WHC is making a commitment to continue contributing to the Conservation Registry, but also plans to provide more evaluative measures of each program through improved data collection. Final design of this data collection is underway, and it is WHC’s hope that all certified programs will be listed along with their final score, the tier of recognition they have achieved, and the conservation outcomes they are focused on, as well as the associated educational efforts and the results of community and employee engagement.

WHC will provide a clear explanation of governance over the new standard. All NGOs have governance bodies. WHC’s Board of Directors ensures regulatory compliance, strategic clarity and ethical leadership. It does not govern programming or content. It will not govern the new standard. To ensure the new standard is governed appropriately–that change is managed, updates reflect changes in the conservation context and best practices, and stakeholders remain key informants—WHC will convene a steering committee specifically focused on governance of the new standard, made up of conservation and education experts, industry and business representatives and those knowledgeable about standards.

This new standard of certification will allow WHC to further its mission to recognize conservation efforts on private lands and encourage more conservation.By providing procedural and outcome transparency, WHC will achieve its recognition goal in a manner that is meaningful, defensible, and that will inspire others to engage in activities to restore habitats and improve biodiversity, while educating and engaging communities and employees.

Setting the New Standard: Scalability is Imperative for Accessibility

This is the third in a series of monthly blog posts exploring the development of a new standard in corporate conservation certification.

In previous posts we have outlined the defining tenets of an effective Voluntary Sustainability Standard (VSS) that will encourage broad adoption and ultimately increase conservation on corporate lands. These tenets are accessibility, credibility and the ability to drive change. In this post we will dive deeper into a key aspect of accessibility – scalability.

The Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) has been recognizing conservation on corporate lands for 27 years. This experience has shown that the one thing corporate landholders have in common is the diversity of the lands they manage. Auto manufacturers have proving grounds, technical centers, manufacturing facilities and corporate headquarters. Electric utilities have facilities that create, store and distribute energy—namely power plants, transmission systems and substations. In the building materials sector, quarries, cement factories and ready-mix facilities are all part of the supply chain. With over 800 programs currently certified, WHC understands the possibilities and challenges of conservation on a wide variety of lands.

While many VSS systems are designed for larger, more sophisticated operations and, in the case of conservation, the best available lands, WHC sees potential in every landholding and welcomes all practitioners to participate. This is why WHC views scalability as imperative to facilitate broad adoption of the new standard for corporate conservation.

In its new standard, WHC is promoting scalability in many different ways, but the best expression of it will be found in the Project Guidance documents that will provide applicants with a clear path through a conservation project. These Project Guidances are being developed through a multi-stakeholder process that sets the minimum requirements for recognition and defined a variety of options for higher-level conservation and education outcomes.

Project Guidances will recognize a suite of themes that include habitat types, education opportunities, species’ needs and other conservation-related activities that can take place on corporate lands. When launched, the new standard will have Project Guidance documents for grasslands, wetlands, arid landscapes, pollinators, birds, reptiles and amphibians, bats, game species, formal and informal education opportunities, green infrastructure, protected lands, invasive species management, and a host of other themes around which corporate land managers can design their projects.

Every Project Guidance lays out the basic requirement for recognition, i.e., the activities that must be undertaken for the project to meet WHC’s new standard. For every project, these requirements will include the need: to be locally appropriate, to provide habitat or community value, to exceed any pertinent regulatory requirements and, to meet a stated conservation or education objective. Further requirements will be specific to the stated objectives of each project and will reflect the conservation needs of the habitat or species or best practices in the delivery of conservation and education.

Once basic requirements have been satisfied, a landowner can then choose from a hierarchy of activities that will lead to higher outcomes and higher levels of recognition. This will allow a landowner to create projects specific to their site’s spatial or other limitations and then scale up to meet the full potential of the location and its surroundings.

Scalability is not merely about the size of the project. It can be accomplished in a variety of ways, as follows:

In a pollinator project, expanding from a basic native garden to a garden with plants supporting multiple pollinator species across multiple seasons or meeting the entire life cycle needs of a specific pollinator.
When implementing invasive species management, expanding from addressing a single species in a single location at a single time to reviewing operations across the location to ensure the spread of invasive species is minimized both on-site and off.
Creating outreach to a community by providing trails and signage, or expanding to embrace the local schools across a number of grades and connecting into the core learning standards.

Scalability allows a program to start small and then grow to encompass larger amounts of land. At General Motors’ Warren Tech Center in Michigan, the project team started on 8 acres in a former parking lot and now manages over 70 acres across the facility.

Scalability allows a program to add new projects or expand existing projects as it matures and continue to create conservation and education value. In Gaithersburg, Maryland, Asbury Methodist Village manages all available acreage for wildlife, but adds value by creating signs and interpretive materials for residents, hosting guest speakers to talk about the natural world, inviting elementary school students on site and installing structures like bird boxes to support wildlife.

Scalability allows a program to go beyond the fence line and connect to contiguous habitat or into the community. In Brazil, Monsanto Do Brasil’s Camaçari Plant does both as it restores and reforests a parcel of land that will serve to reconnect two large fragments of Atlantic Forest, one of the most threatened biomes in the world, and uses the project as a teaching tool for students from 40 neighboring schools.

For a VSS to be successful, it must be accessible. To be accessible to all landholders, it must be scalable. WHC is enshrining scalability in its Project Guidance documents, which will be published with the launch of the new standard later this year. In doing so, WHC will ensure that every applicant—regardless of the size and other strictures on their landholdings—will be provided with a clear path towards program establishment, growth, and recognition.

Connecting to Enhance WHC Certification

In early February, the Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) convened an impressive group of stakeholders to kick-start the design phase of an enhanced certification program that, when launched, will incorporate contemporary conservation and education initiatives to ensure and incentivize the best conservation projects and education programs across WHC’s membership.

This meeting was attended by representatives from federal agencies including Interior, Agriculture, State, Education, Defense and EPA. Non-profit partners Pollinator Partnership, Defenders of Wildlife, The Conservation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and Monarch Watch also participated. Representing the WHC corporate membership were employees from ExxonMobil, Waste Management, Bridgestone, BP, and others.

A number of themes emerged from this meeting but every breakout group circled back to the theme of “connections” and the challenges and opportunities for making them happen. It seems that the unique nature of the conservation and education projects developed and delivered by the members of WHC offers many chances to connect. Here are some of the unique opportunities discussed at the meeting:

Connecting across boundaries: The desire to transcend boundaries—to work “across the fence”—surfaced throughout the day. In the US, that means connecting conservation work being conducted on private land with that being done on public lands, whether held by the state or federal government. On the global level, many WHC members have operations outside the borders of a single country and can use their global operations to impact wildlife and environmental health across these borders. WHC member PPG Industries’ work connecting monarch habitat on two of its properties in Mexico and Pennsylvania is a prime example of using projects in different countries to benefit a single species and connect education efforts in support of a species that is in serious decline across its range.

Connecting to Corporate STEM goals: Many of WHC’s members invest in STEM education to create the scientifically literate workforce necessary for their future operations. These investments support the work of large efforts advancing STEM on the national stage. Through their work with WHC, members can use their lands to promote STEM education by providing hands-on, relevant STEM opportunities to learners of all ages. For example, Waste Management’s El Sobrante Landfill and Wildlife Preserve in California provides an opportunity for children to learn the science of landfill operations and management of wildlife including rare and recovering species.

The Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) convened an impressive group of stakeholders to kick-start the design phase of an enhanced certification program.

Connecting within industry sectors: When the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association (NRMCA) wanted to connect its members with a common approach to biodiversity projects, it partnered with WHC to develop a biodiversity toolkit. This toolkit provides operators of ready mixed concrete production facilities with examples of projects that enhance biodiversity with little or no impact on operations. The toolkit gives the operator guidance on starting a project and working towards certification. By creating a common starting point for facilities across the country, and beyond, WHC creates connections within this industry sector.

Through these connections, and many more, WHC believes that its members’ efforts amount to an outcome that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Building on this stakeholder meeting, we will continue, over the next 12 months, to explore these connections further. We plan to take the conversation across the country and beyond and, with our government and NGO partners define, formalize and internalize these connections, translate them into actions and projects that any corporate member can implement on their property for high quality conservation and education outcomes.

For information, contact Margaret.

Tag Archive for: certification

An Introduction to Land Conservation Agreements

View the webinar

Land Conservation Agreements limit a property’s uses in order to protect its conservation values. This enhanced or permanent protection of corporate lands can help conserve the natural, scenic, or rural qualities of the land for today and for future generations, adding to the depth of your Conservation Certification® goals. Join Sylvia Bates of the Land Trust Alliance to explore the basics of conservation agreements. You’ll also hear case studies of successful corporate and land trust partnerships.

You’ll learn:

What is a land conservation agreement, also known as a land trust
How to choose an appropriate land trust partner for your project
Benefits of conservation easements and other types of conservation strategies to help meet your goals
Questions to ask to ensure success of your project and partnership
How a land conservation agreement fits into your Conservation Certification program
Successful outcomes from case studies that demonstrate how real-world companies met challenges and realized benefits by working with land trusts

Presenter:

Sylvia Bates, Director of Standards & Educational Services, Land Trust Alliance
Stephen T. Johnson, President, North American Land Trust
Kamara Sams, Environmental Community Relations, The Boeing Company

View the webinar

Tag Archive for: certification

Setting the New Standard: Aligning Conservation Goals with Existing Priorities

Read more WHC blogs.

Setting the New Standard: Supported Approaches Empower Success

Read more WHC blogs.

Setting the New Standard: Transparency Matters

Read more WHC blogs.

Setting the New Standard: Scalability is Imperative for Accessibility

Read more WHC blogs.

Connecting to Enhance WHC Certification

Read more WHC blogs.

Tag Archive for: certification

An Introduction to Land Conservation Agreements

About

Work With WHC

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Tag Archive for: certification

Tag Archive for: certification

About

Work With WHC

Learn More

Member

UN Global Compact Business for Nature

Official ally

World Benchmarking Alliance

UN Global Compact
Business for Nature