Sekisui House : Working with Customers for 20 Years to Conserve Urban Biodiversity with the Gohon no ki Indigenous Landscaping Concept —Opening the Way to Financial Evaluation of Biodiversity with Publication of Nature-Positive Methodology— NEW

● Ms. Mariko Kawaguchi, Specially Appointed Professor, Rikkyo University / Executive Advisor to CEO, Fuji Oil Holdings Inc.
Ms. Mariko Kawaguchi, a leading sustainability management expert active in advising stakeholders (companies, financial service providers, consumers) on SDG issues, has provided the following endorsement.

"The COP26 UN Climate Change Conference has ended. Although the world has made little progress toward achieving the goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C, moves are afoot to leverage the financial system to tackle climate change. Like climate change, declining biodiversity also poses a threat to humanity's sustainability, but initiatives to reverse this decline have been very slow to get off the ground owing to the difficulty of understanding the issues involved, quantifying biodiversity, and formulating appropriate actions.

"The quantification of biodiversity is key to motivating society to conserve biodiversity. This evaluation of the effectiveness of the Gohon no ki Project is a landmark initiative that has achieved the long-awaited goal of quantifying biodiversity by surveying garden tree planting at the individual level to quantitatively evaluate biodiversity at the national level.
It is also an excellent example of successful partnership between science, industry, and private individuals that will likely serve as a model for future sustainability initiatives. Another noteworthy aspect is the way this initiative can open the eyes of city-dwellers, who tend to think of networks of diverse ecosystems as being about distant countryside and oceans, to the fact that biodiversity is actually very much part of their world, and something that they themselves can nurture in their own gardens.

"Measures that make use of natural capital are needed today also to tackle climate change, and this Gohon no ki Project will hopefully serve as a model for initiatives that leverage partnership between science, business, and the general public to promote the conservation and restoration of biodiversity throughout the world."