Saving the world on spare change isn’t enough. We need more.

If you look across the conservation sector you’ll notice it is dominated by charities. 

At Conservation Careers we share around 15,000 conservation jobs each year from across the globe, and around 80% are in nonprofits of the third sector. These are:

• ... incredible charities tackling some of the biggest issues of our time.
• ... amazing charities, full of passionate staff dedicating their careers to making the world a better place.
• ... charities large and small, that urgently need all of our support.

But there’s a problem…

The amount of support we can raise through charitable donations ins’t enough to tackle the big existential threats of our time - biodiversity loss and climate change. 

If it were, we’d be winning these battles.

Saving the world on spare change isn’t enough. We need more.

Despite the growth and professionalisation in conservation charities - with improved marketing, communications, project management and fundraising activities - we need other sectors to quickly join the race to save the planet. And they better have deeper pockets and be able to act fast.

So who is the likely candidate for impact expansion?

For me, it’s the private sector, and I’ve noticed a change in recent years when speaking to people working for and with big businesses and corporations. 

Alongside the growing number of laws and regulations encouraging the private sector to take carbon and biodiversity into account within their operations - like Biodiversity Net Loss - there’s been a deeper motivation to act. Their customers, and perhaps more importantly their staff, want to do the right thing. 

I remember chatting on the podcast with Mark Rose during his time as Chief Executive Officer and Fauna & Flora International and he described how when speaking to senior executives of some of the largest businesses on the planet, the dialogue has shifted from “what’s the problem” to “how can we help”. In recent years I’d go further and say for many companies it’s becoming “look at what we’re achieving”.

And it’s not always because of how it looks, or perhaps because of new rules they have to adhere to - sometimes it’s because it’s simply the right thing to do. 

In another podchat I had with Michael Burgass (Director of Biodiversify) he spoke about his work with companies such as Primark, who are quietly doing some great work to build biodiversity accounting and actions into their businesses. Go into one of their stores and you wouldn’t know it - there are no posters on the walls about it - but their staff are driving the changes internally, and for me, it’s a beacon of hope.

So more and more companies are seeing biodiversity as important and are acting, and the good news is they have collectively much deeper pockets than charities. 

Figures suggest that the private sector could be between 8 and 12 times larger than the nonprofit sector in terms of revenue. Let’s call it 10 times for simplicity.

Put another way, if 10% of private sector revenues were directed towards sustainability initiatives, it would be the same as doubling the charity sector overnight. 

The private sector also can act quickly. Their models can be agile, innovative and fast, and because they can often be the source of a problem … they are best placed to solve them.

All this means we might just have a fighting chance after all.