Accountability Accelerator

“The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.” Sir David Attenborough
Biologist, natural historian and author.

The Accountability Accelerator is uniquely designed to work across the entire accountability landscape. It will help hold corporations accountable for delivering on their nature and climate commitments so that the global commons are restored and sustainably used, and we stay within safe and just boundaries.

The Accountability Accelerator is working with the Science-based Targets Network and other target and standards setters to provide the tools companies need to translate commitments into performance aligned with science.

The Accountability Accelerator is designed to fill the gaps, enable close coordination between stakeholders (local and global), even the ones who do not naturally interact or know of potential opportunities to interact so that together these groups can work collectively to pull all available levers that drive urgent change.

Mission

Our mission is to ensure that corporations are delivering on their nature commitments in line with science, contributing to the restoration, sustainable use, and protection of the global commons in order to stay within our planetary boundaries.

Ambitions

To achieve our mission, we believe all stakeholders must work together and be supported by a multi-layered accountability ecosystem or architecture with mutually reinforcing and complementary approaches that ensure accountability for all.

The Accountability Accelerator has five core ambitions to help us get there:

1. Map accountability and build architecture

To guide our accountability process and capture the complexity of the ecosystem, we have depicted the concept of corporate accountability as an iterative infinity loop.

1. Starts with companies understanding their impacts and dependencies.

2. Ensures that companies are reporting in a way that is verifiable.

3. Full loop helps ratchet up corporate ambition through rule change, a culmination of good policies, market signals, consumer behaviours, (e.g. changing corporate purpose, fiduciary duty, etc.)

Accountability Accelerator Infinity Loop

2. Nurture innovation and spur action by all stakeholders

Stakeholder engagement is one of the key ingredients for Accountability Accelerator’s success.

The stakeholder wheel illustrates the wider community of actors we are engaging or plan to work with, especially from the Global South, either as beneficiaries of grants, as partners, as agents to influence, or the agents of change that can catalyse corporate accountability.

Accountability Accelerator Accountability Wheel

3. Drive collaboration, synergies, and engagement.

The Accountability Accelerator is working on corporate influence through four primary levers, referred to as “clusters”:

Data & Standards

Provide accountability stakeholders with the information they need to understand what and how companies are disclosing against results and actions, and ensuring actors are empowered for monitoring, reporting and verification.

Finance

Engage, mobilise, and enable the finance sector to take action on the global commons in a manner that drives corporate accountability for commitments and delivery of performance for nature.

Legal

Reduce corporate actions that are harmful for nature and biodiversity by mandating disclosure, driving ambitious regulation, and enforcing existing legislation, while supporting systems changes such as redefining fiduciary duty.

Campaigns

Incentivize and support corporate action on the global commons through awareness and recognition by empowering stakeholders to lead activism and campaigns, and activating grass-roots efforts, especially in the Global South.

4. Support a variety of efforts through grantmaking

We’re currently funding several early-stage projects and organizations that will contribute to building an accountability architecture across the four clusters, including:

World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA)

Nature Benchmark – Accountability mechanism for the private sectors most influential companies

Capitals Coalition

The Capitals Protocol: Integrating the value provided by nature, people & the economy into business decision making.

CDP

Global Corporate engagement strategy to drive adoption of and accountability to the SBTN

Finance for Biodiversity Foundation

Scoping for Nature Action 100 (NA100)

Ceres

Investor-Driven Accountability for Companies on Land and Biodiversity

Share Action

Embedding Biodiversity in our Global Investment System

ProDESC

Strengthening the accountability of the energy sector to protect the land, territory and natural resources of communities in the Global South.

RAID

Building a Just Transition to Renewable Energies – Strengthening Accountability for the Environmental Impacts of Cobalt Mining in DR Congo and Beyond.…

Restless Development

Youth-led Campaigning and Action on GCAA and The Science Based Targets

5. Drive changes in corporate behavior

With a broad range of accountability stakeholders each playing their coordinated roles, they can together create a robust and effective accountability ecosystem, rewarding corporate ambition and delivery, and punishing non-compliance. By using science-based targets as the baseline, building the materiality of nature into corporate decision-making will enable company implementation and positive impact on nature, climate and society.