19 December 2023. Michael Guerin, AgForce CEO.
Our future depends on the resilience of nature - and it's vital our industry plays a big part in ensuring that outcome.
All our prospective cashflows rely on ecosystem services flowing from nature for many years to come.
So it follows that Nature Risk is not a separate entity from our lives and businesses - in fact it inherently sits in the cashflows, balance sheets and aspirations of producers and communities.
But here's the rub. The complexity and duplication of policy settings, frameworks, and voluntary and compulsory standards is mindboggling. Which ultimately distracts us from doing all in our power to encourage nature's resilience.
To name just a few - these policies include the Taskforce for Nature Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), the Taskforce for Climate Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), ISSB and GRI Standards…...I could go on.
How can a producer, in most cases a family-owned business, hope to make sense of all this, then understand and apply those principles on property in a way that maximises Natural Capital and ensures the landholder is given adequate recompense?
On top of all that, we have participants in our supply chain, for example banks, also imposing their own version of nature-related compliance on producers.
If we want industry and nature to thrive, the landholder must be put back at the centre of the opportunity and obligation for their landscapes - pure and simple.
AgCarE does this. It encourages the farmer to engage directly by documenting how they manage land sustainability; thereby connecting environment resilience with economic outcomes and offering evidence-based data that ultimately leads to better landscapes, biodiversity, access to markets, productivity, and resource management. AgCarE operates under the principle of continuous improvement.
AgCarE measures the health of the interdependent relationship between agricultural production, ecosystem services and the human beneficiaries that depend on a healthy environment to produce the food and fibre it yields.
It's a verifiable and comprehensive approach built by and for landholders that makes sense of it all. Check it out at https://www.agcare.org.au/
