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Everyone’s environment: the global movement to restore nature’s biodiversity

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On 5th June 2021, the global community came together to celebrate World Environment Day with each year having a different topic as the primary focus; this year’s was ‘Ecosystem Restoration’.

TED Circles

With this in mind, the latest edition of the ISS-hosted TED Circles series looked at Ecologist Thomas Crowther’s talk on The global movement to restore nature’s biodiversity.

Joanna Leyden, Waste Operations Manager and Helene Carpentier, Senior Project Manager, led the discussion inspired by the Ted Talk by Thomas Crowther.

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Thomas Crowther

In his talk, Crowther discusses the importance of the environmental systems that the Earth has in play and how it is important to maintain every system if we want to tackle the climate emergency. He discusses how his simple message of planting more trees was picked up as a golden bullet’ to tackle climate change, when in fact, it is just one of various actions required to drive the positive change we require.

Letting nature be

Crowther’s talk led to some great discussions in our ‘Circle’ on the importance of biodiversity; and how it is attracts less attention than carbon and plastics which both gain a lot of media coverage. The idea that we need to do less, and leave land alone to recover, rather than actively ‘do something’ was an interesting concept to examine.

We discussed how offsetting has become common practice in many companies’ journey to reducing their carbon emissions. Whilst it is great to see the commitment being made our conversations highlighted the importance of ensuring this offsetting is done with biodiversity in mind to ensure that habitats are being restored in the right way.

Through our discussions we touched on the impact the natural environment has on our wellbeing. The global pandemic especially has made people realise the importance of protecting our natural world so we can enjoy it.

What can be done in the workplace?

Our conversations then turned to how we can support our customers in improving their contribution to increasing biodiversity. Ideas such as roof gardens, insect hotels and re-wilding of land came up as a few of the great ideas underway, as well as raising employee awareness of the things they can do at home to make a difference.

World Environment Day on 5th June is one day to focus on our environment, and to all gain further inspiration on what we can do every day: https://www.worldenvironmentday.global/

 

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