In September 2020, H&M Group officially launched its ambition for biodiversity, to which WWF experts had been a sounding board. The ambition sparked the beginning of the partnership’s new focus on biodiversity.
The H&M Group biodiversity ambition was released in connection with the WWF’s Living Planet Report 2020, the study that analyses trends in global biodiversity and the health of the planet. The report provides scientific evidence for what nature has been telling us repeatedly: that unsustainable human activity is pushing the natural systems that support life on Earth to the edge.
In the ambition, H&M Group states a long-term vision of having a net positive impact on biodiversity. This means to avoid and mitigate harm, and also to leave the natural environment in a better state than before through habitat restoration and protection.
To achieve this, H&M Group has set two objectives:
- To prevent and reduce the company’s overall impact on biodiversity and natural ecosystems in the value chain.
- Help to protect and restore biodiversity and natural ecosystems in line with what science requires.
The base for H&M Group’s ambition is a biodiversity footprint assessment that identifies the biggest impact areas of the business. It provides the company a direction to where the most meaningful efforts that support biodiversity and nature can be made.
A new offical workstream
In late 2020, biodiversity became a new workstream in the WWF H&M Group partnership. The aim of the work is to reduce H&M’s overall pressures on biodiversity and nature and to strive towards net-gain impacts.
Between 2021-2025, the partnership’s focus is to address land and water-use impacts of raw material sourcing and production. The partnership will also seek collaborations on impact projects in critical landscapes and look to scale solutions and actions within the business community that specifically focus on biodiversity protection, maintenance and recovery intervention. In addition, focus will also be on increasing overall awareness of the importance and an urgency to act on biodiversity and nature loss among other business and policy makers.
Further, the partnership will work with biodiversity impact projects by assessing and prioritising impact reductions in critical habitats and species linked to H&M’s production and to WWF’s priority areas.
The partnership will also work with advocacy and awareness raising on biodiversity loss with the aim to drive change in the whole industry.
