Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) could be your next comparative advantage. Juliana Mutis, March 2025

Coffee recently reached its highest price in 50 years, however, this does not mean that there is a bonanza in the sector, the lack of labor, the climatic conditions, disrupt the stability of the supply chain given the low profitability and good conditions in primary production. The scarcity of water in production systems aimed at the ingredients industry limits production and therefore the development of new markets. It is not possible to stock up on wild products, such as wild oregano, which has a high disinfectant differential value given its high content of carvacol and thymol vs. cultivated oregano, to develop innovative products and markets at scale, if there is no integrated management of the forest space that allows constant use and in volume. A company with infrastructure that impacts the natural space will hardly be able to maintain its business over time and when it corresponds to carry out a self-sustainable conservation model if it does not carry out a comprehensive intervention with a landscape approach.

All these situations and others that companies do not always consider and that directly and indirectly affect the performance and competitiveness of the business, are among the challenges that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers can be solved with NBS. These are: climate change mitigation and adaptation, disaster risk reduction, economic and social development, human health, food security, water security, and environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.

Advancing in actions towards the supply chain is not only a commitment within decarbonization strategies, it is an imperative need to stay in the market given the climate volatility and loss of biodiversity in which we find ourselves. Therefore, actions for climate change mitigation, adaptation and biodiversity management, in addition to being adopted as sustainability strategies for the business itself, must be understood in a systemic way. From this perspective, the company with its market lever is an articulator of NBS where mixed financing mechanisms, producer organizations, guilds and other public and private actors intervene. And in this way, to ensure the conservation of the landscape that allows it to carry out its operation, the supply chain that guarantees the volumes to meet growing demands and the raw materials that give it a differential value, it understands well what are the climate and biodiversity challenges that affect or enhance its business and from here it becomes a catalyst for actions that in a solitary way do not could carry out, but given its role it is in greater capacity to enhance.

Taking the initial examples and not limiting ourselves, but using only some NBS, agroforestry systems can reduce fertilizer costs, increase productivity in the long term and make production more resilient, the introduction of mycorrhizae to increase water retention in productions highly affected by drought, allows increasing productivity, enhancing the presence of a pollinator can have positive effects on quality. But NBS should not only be understood in primary production, they also involve the introduction of transformation processes, which allow adding value locally to generate greater incentives for the production model that considers regeneration.

I can understand the apparent difficulty for a company, which is not the same producer of the raw material, to feel close to this type of strategy. Each of us, and your company too, are part of a system connected to the rhythms of nature and only by understanding it in this way will you be able to understand why we should take care of pollinators because they are a source of benefits for medicine, people, ensuring food, among many other benefits.

Juliana Mutis Marín
CEO and Founder minkadev

minkadev is a member of the Private Foundation for Business and Climate