BGCI is a worldwide plant conservation organisation, linking over 800 botanic gardens and other botanical institutions from more than 120 countries. HSBC is one of the largest banking and financial services organisations in the world. In 2002 HSBC created Investing in Nature, a five-year, $50m partnership with three environmental organisations to fund three conservation programmes. The partnership had three aims – to resuscitate three of the world’s major rivers; to deliver a century of environmental research and to help halt global plant extinction. Its partners were the Earthwatch Institute, WWF and BGCI.
Aims
HSBC awarded BGCI a grant of $11.6m to fund a Partnership for Plants, the aims of which were:
– to protect 20,000 plants from extinction
– to educate at least 400,000 people through a website with information on 2,000 botanic gardens
– to target two and a half million people in over 10 countries with new public education programmes.
Structuring the partnership
The partnership agreement included clear milestones to help ensure that partners shared clear expectations of what was to be achieved and by when. Quarterly reporting meetings with HSBC meant problems could be discussed as they arose and remedial action taken promptly. HSBC held joint meetings with all three of its partners to look at future activities and opportunities for synergy.
BGCI was able to deliver projects and conservation action in all of the bank’s major markets. As there were no obvious links between biodiversity and HSBC’s core business, employee volunteering formed a key part of BGCI’s strategy to make biodiversity relevant to the company.
Challenges
BGCI said initially it struggled to match its own working practices with those of a large multinational bank, although regular meetings have helped minimise cultural differences and ensured the project progressed well. Key to this was gaining an understanding of why companies enter into partnerships and learning to talk the language of business, BGCI said.The need to work in many countries with different languages and cultures also posed a challenge for BGCI. Its solution was to work through local partners and employ local staff. These local partners also teamed up with local HSBC offices, creating local opportunities for employees to contribute to a global programme.
Impacts and achievements
BGCI says it met, and in some cases exceeded the specific aims of the project, although measuring accurately the impact of projects on the basis of conservation and human well-being indicators is often difficult. BGCI used only those indicators that could be quantified, which inevitably placed the focus on outputs of the project rather than actual impacts.
Susanne Sharrock, BGCI’s director of global programmes, said it is possible for a small NGO such as BGCI to be an effective partner with a large international corporation. “With the backing of a partner such as HSBC, a huge impact can be achieved by a small organisation – without the large overheads associated with the larger NGOs,” she told Briefing. The partnership transformed BGCI into “an effective, highly regarded and catalytic organisation”.
Additionally, HSBC’s support was essential in the development and ultimate adoption of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, which for the first time ever introduced targets for biodiversity conservation at the international level.
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