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Biodiversity and Business Action Plan

A South African business perspective – The EWT’s Biodiversity and Business Action Plan

By Catherine Kühn – Biodiversity Disclosure Project Manager, Endangered wildlife trust

The Biodiversity and Business Action Plan (BBAP) is a cross-sectoral 65-page document which culminates the 2 years of work with Business for Nature.

It is a guidance tool and a feedback resource for South African businesses which captures insights directly from companies to reflect their progress in biodiversity mainstreaming while also supporting them on their journey.

The BBAP offers sector mapping, a roadmap for biodiversity mainstreaming, and key indicators for integrating Target 15 into business practices.

Biodiversity loss is no longer a separate or secondary issue to climate change. It’s a very real and prevalent environmental concern and a business reality. The biodiversity crisis is an urgent and interconnected issue that threatens the stability of natural systems. It is waking up economies, industries, and businesses. As planetary boundaries continue to be pushed beyond safe limits, the consequences are becoming increasingly harder to reverse. If we don’t act collectively and decisively now, we risk tipping the scales beyond recovery.

As the world moves towards sustainability, South African companies are beginning to recognise that integrating biodiversity into decision-making is not just about compliance – it’s about long-term resilience. Many businesses are already on this journey with some making steady progress; a few are emerging as leaders, while others demonstrate interest but remain uncertain about where to begin. And then there are those yet to wake up to this urgency. But the message is clear: biodiversity action is not optional—it’s a business imperative.

Our Business Advisory Group (BAG) engagements confirm that businesses need support in biodiversity integration. The Biodiversity and Business Action Plan (BBAP), developed by the EWT’s Biodiversity and Business Unit (BBU), serves as a guidance tool and feedback resource, capturing insights directly from companies to reflect their progress and support their journey.

Key findings

There is strong business awareness of biodiversity’s importance—77% of our Business Advisory Group participants see it as extremely important to South Africa’s economy while 100% of respondents acknowledge biodiversity loss as a risk to their company, highlighting the urgent need for action.

While most companies recognise biodiversity’s importance, 64% are still in the early stages of the journey towards biodiversity action.

The top three focus areas of companies’ biodiversity efforts are 1. biodiversity initiatives at local sites, 2. employee capacity building and training around biodiversity and 3. meeting biodiversity compliance and reporting obligations.

Companies are familiar with, amongst others, the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), the King IV report for Corporate Governance in South Africa and the JSE Sustainability

Disclosure Guidance, yet most lack a formal biodiversity strategy. A total of 60% said they did not have dedicated budgets for biodiversity, highlighting a gap between awareness and action.

Many companies rely on biodiversity consultants for environmental work, while some have in-house sustainability teams. A total of 85% of respondents said their company needs additional biodiversity training and capacity-building.

Discussions from the four BAG workshops in 2024 provided valuable insights into how businesses viewed their role in supporting biodiversity targets. The dominant Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) themes that emerged were ‘Implementation and Mainstreaming’, followed by ‘Reducing Threats’ and ‘Sustainable Use and Benefit Sharing’.

Notably, there is strong alignment with Target 15 (Business) and Target 19 (Finance), with recognition of Target 19 increasing significantly throughout the BAG process. This shift highlights the growing awareness of the need for financial mechanisms to support biodiversity integration, including investment in nature-positive solutions.

What does this mean?

Businesses recognise biodiversity’s importance and risks, yet most are still in early integration stages. Awareness is high, but action, reporting, and investment remain limited. There is a need to embed biodiversity into corporate decision-making, rather than viewing it as an additional expense and burden. With all the respondents recognising biodiversity loss as a risk means there is urgency to develop structured biodiversity strategies. Yet, with most companies still relying on consultants and lacking dedicated budgets for biodiversity, this remains a challenge.

The reliance on compliance-driven actions rather than proactive biodiversity decisiveness suggests that many businesses are reactive rather than strategic. The high demand for capacity-building (85%) further re-inforces that businesses need more guidance to navigate this. Without adequate skills, knowledge, and funding structures, biodiversity commitments risk remaining future aspirations.

The results also indicate a need for business-government cohesion, clearer policy direction, stronger incentives, and greater regulatory support to ensure businesses can effectively align with national biodiversity commitments.

The road ahead

While the BBAP is a milestone, real change will come from businesses taking ownership of their biodiversity strategies. Businesses must strengthen biodiversity knowledge and skills, supported by standardised reporting frameworks to meaningfully track progress. There is also a need for collaboration across sectors – including government and NGOs. Additionally, financial incentives and policy support are needed to encourage and incentivise biodiversity-positive practices.

From referring to the many frameworks and tools that exist to “framework chaos”, our BAG members have been pivotal in providing honest, constructive and catalytic feedback when it comes to their specific needs, challenges and vision for their business and for their sector.

Companies require clear roadmaps, sector-specific strategies, and the right tools to integrate biodiversity into operations. However, the lack of dedicated biodiversity roles, capacity and budgets indicates the urgency to make a stronger business case—one that highlights both the risks of inaction and the opportunities of nature-positive practices.

This process has also proven that businesses have a voice in shaping government policy, contributing to the National Biodiversity Strategic Action Plan (NBSAP) and ensuring corporate commitments are reflected in national targets. This work is a call to action for businesses to take the lead—not just as participants but as pioneers of innovation and sustainability. The journey is challenging, but the opportunity to leave a legacy for generations to come makes it one worth taking.

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Lydenburg Learners Celebrate World Wetlands Day at De Berg Wetland

Eulalia Jordaan, an MPTA ecological technician, showed the learners the different kinds of plants found in the wetland

On 31 January, the Mpumalanga Wetland Forum chaired by the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Bradley Gibbons hosted Grade 7 learners from Lydenburg Primary School as part of a World Wetlands Day celebration at the De Berg Wetland in Mpumalanga.

The De Berg Wetland is South Africa’s 30th Ramsar site and is therefore a wetland of international importance.

World Wetlands Day is celebrated annually on 2 February to mark the date of the adoption of the Convention on Wetlands in 1971 in the Iranian city of Ramsar. The theme this year was ‘Protecting Wetlands for our Common Future’.

The event comprised talks by Bradley Gibbons about what wetlands are, how they function, and the importance of wetlands and the impact these water resources have on communities reliant on the water flowing from them. Marius Kruger of Northam Platinum provided an overview of the De Berg wetland and the species of concern found in this pristine area.

The learners accompanied officials from the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, the EWT and Northam Platinum to the heart of the wetland where they learnt about the difference between grassland, wetland and peat soils, and the various plant species found in the grasslands surrounding the wetland.

Bradley Gibbons, EWT senior field officer, explains the importance of wetlands to learners from Lydenberg primary school

Children feeling the different types of soil found in wetland environments

A Wild Dog Valentine Story

By Cole du Plessis

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defines ‘relocation’ as the deliberate movement of organisms from one place to another for conservation purposes. This is also known as a conservation translocation.

In the space of Wild Dog management, a conservation purpose can include several different activities: a reintroduction, a genetic swap or a population supplementation. In the case of the managed metapopulation tool that we’ve implemented to grow range distribution for Wild Dogs in South Africa (the EWTs Wild Dog Range Expansion Project), we sometimes do relocations where we move Wild Dogs to temporary holding to bond new packs or bring them to safety if they have been exposed to human-animal conflict.

In February, the EWTs Carnivore Conservation Programme relocated two male Wild Dogs from Lapalala Wilderness Reserve to Rietspruit Game Reserve. The two males were two-years old and had left their natal pack to go in search of unrelated females, with the hope of forming a new pack of their own. They were fondly nicknamed ‘Starsky and Hutch’. When Wild Dogs enter this phase of dispersal, they can cover several hundred kilometres in only a week. This often results in them leaving protected areas and encountering danger. This was the case of the Lapalala males, and with use of the GPS collars, the Lapalala management team managed to track them, capture them and bring them to safety.

The next challenge we faced was to find a suitable home for these two males. While human-induced threats such as snaring, poisoning, disease and roadkill do pose a major threat to Wild Dogs, diminishing safe space is their primary threat. So, a rehoming exercise included finding eligible females that were in a similar phase of their life.

Following a search of several months, we found a small pack of females at Rietspruit Game Reserve that had lost their only male to a Lion ambush towards the end of last year. Only two female Wild Dogs remained and had stayed in the general area for some time. We felt that this could be an opportunity to not only rehome the males, but reestablish a viable pack by introducing males to the two females.

All conservation partners were onboard, and the planning was underway. We would relocate the two male Wild Dogs to Rietspruit Game Reserve and place them in the predator boma. With some luck, the females would find the males, and the bonding would commence through the fence. Wild Dogs have an incredible, and somewhat unknown, ability to pick up the scent of other Wild Dogs from many kilometres away.

So, on 3 February, we immobilised Starsky and Hutch, fitted a new collar on them and drew some genetic samples. We then placed them in our new state-of-the-art ‘Wild Dog Box’ that had been custom made to fit into our Ford Rangers. Six hours later, we safely offloaded the Wild Dogs in the Rietspruit predator boma.

The two female Wild Dogs also had tracking collars, but they hadn’t registered for several days in the lead up to the relocation and we weren’t 100% sure where they were – a classic curveball! Our fear was that they might have suddenly bomb shelled, which would have greatly compromised this mission. Fortunately, the monitoring team picked them up the day after the relocation, about six kilometres from where the two males were. We opted to give the females time to find the males – hoping that they would approve and keep interested enough to stay and bond with the males at the boma.

We waited for 24 hours, but the link hadn’t been made just yet. So, two days after the relocation, we decided to improvise. We took grass out of the Wild Dog Box, rolled it into a ball and used a lot of string to hold it in place. We then went out and found the females, deployed our grass ball off the back of the vehicle and started driving towards the boma. This grass ball immediately caught their interest and the plan was working…and we figured if we could even get them halfway there with some ‘hoo’ calls in-between, then maybe they would do the rest themselves. But the plan was working better than anticipated! In fact, we couldn’t drive fast enough. These females were desperately following the scent – clocking 50km/h. We ticked off the first kilometre, then another, and then another. The only thing that was giving way was our grass ball. By kilometre number five, it was no bigger than bowling ball, but it was enough to pull the females the final distance.

The link had been made. The two groups had met at the fence and the interactions were underway. A lot of flirting, scent marking and high-pitched murmurs – maybe it was love at first sight. The females have stayed at the boma since. Before the end of February, and after the males have had a little more time to acclimatise, the gates will be opened and the new pack will have the chance to bond – and they might just be in time for the Wild Dogs denning season which usually commences this time of year.
Some Wild Dog pups in 2025 will be the cherry on the top!

We would like to thank our partners, the Rietspruit Game Reserve, Painted Dog Tv., Lapalala Game Reserve, LEDET.

Turning Traps into Hope: Poacher’s Snares Repurposed for Conservation

By John Davies

Across much of Africa, snaring of wildlife is on the rise, driven by a combination of poverty, bushmeat demand, and organized wildlife crime. With economic hardships pushing more people toward illegal hunting for sustenance or profit, snares have become the weapon of choice—they are cheap, easy to set, and devastatingly effective. However, they do not discriminate, often trapping unintended species, including elephants, lions, and wild dogs. Many animals suffer prolonged, agonising deaths, while those that survive can be left with severe injuries that compromise their ability to hunt or evade predators.

In a significant step toward protecting South Africa’s wildlife, the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) recently removed 3.5 tons of wire snares from a protected area in the Lowveld region of South Africa, forming a critical buffer zone along Kruger National Park’s western boundary. These snares had been stockpiled over the last five years and had been removed during routine patrols by reserve anti-poaching teams.

Instead of being discarded, the snares have been given a second life through a partnership with Down2theWire, a local initiative that transforms confiscated poaching materials into handcrafted jewellery. This innovative project not only raises awareness about the devastating effects of snaring, but also provides funding for conservation efforts generated through the sale of jewellery and other products made from snares. Profits from the jewellery sales will be reinvested into anti-poaching initiatives, supporting rangers, education programs, and community-driven conservation efforts.

This initiative underscores the importance of sustainable solutions in wildlife conservation, proving that even the most destructive tools can be reshaped into symbols of resilience and protection.

As wildlife crime continues to challenge conservationists, creative collaborations like this offer a beacon of hope. Consumers can now play a direct role in the fight against poaching—one bracelet at a time.

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Plant poaching: An underestimated threat to biodiversity

By Esther Matthew

Roadblocks for illegally traded wildlife products

Succulent poaching has shown a marked increase in South Africa in recent years. Many of these plants will literally bring you to your knees due to their tiny size. But, once you see the details on them, you are immediately transported to world that many people often walk over without noticing.

Unfortunately, poachers have taken note of this, which has resulted in an incredible increase in the illegal harvesting of these unique plants over the last five years, with approximately half a million plants poached in a year. This is a significant problem, with some plant species already pushed to extinction in the wild.

For the EWT Conservation Canine Unit and the Drylands Conservation Programme the solution to most conservation problems is getting nosy, and with that we mean using scent detection dogs to assist us in our conservation work, and in sniffing out any plants being smuggled. Dogs have an remarkable scent ability and are able even find a drop of odour in a waterbody the size two Olympic swimming pools! Keeping that in mind, our two programmes teamed up in 2023 and to train the first three scent detection dogs to help combat the succulent plant poaching problem. In joint operations, our efforts were aimed at screening vehicles at roadblocks and parcels at courier companies. In the first 2 months of working with these dogs we were able to assist the local law enforcement officials supported with four cases, resulting in nine arrests. So, it turns out being nosy is not always a bad thing, and it can even help save our endemic plants.

Thanks to the Dertour Foundation, Endangered Ink and Tourvest, we can continue the work with our dogs to help combat the poaching problem for not only plants but also a variety of other wildlife contraband

Roadblock with Police