Stakeholder engagement is critical for the success of any effort to address nature loss and degradation. SBTN released its Stakeholder Engagement Guidance (V1.0) in 2024 to support companies setting science-based targets with guidance and resources based on best practices to include in the implementation of the target-setting methods. 

The guidance focuses on how to engage with and recognize the knowledge and potential contributions of Indigenous peoples, local communities, and other stakeholders who are (directly or indirectly) affected in positive and negative ways by your company’s activities and value chains. Crucially, affected stakeholders include your workforce as well as workers in all other segments of the value chains.

Engaging Indigenous peoples and other affected stakeholders in target setting and evaluation also allows you to meet your responsibilities as laid out by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Responsible Business Conduct: the global, authoritative standards of responsible business conduct with regard to impacts on people and planet. The guidance will help you to uphold the rights of Indigenous peoples as set out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and to contribute to global frameworks such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)’s Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This will in turn enable you to align your practice with the growing number of due diligence regulations and reporting requirements based on these international standards (e.g., the European Sustainability Reporting Standards and the Global Reporting Initiative).

The guidance explains key considerations for engaging with these stakeholders, always recognizing the value of their knowledge and potential contributions in the target-setting process. Implementing the guidance will help you to:

• Establish targets that are seen as credible by those most directly affected by the outcomes.
• Form partnerships with stakeholders on data collection, analysis, and learning.
• Establish relationships with Indigenous peoples and other affected stakeholders that contribute to building collective action for the achievement of science-based targets.
• Build accountability for outcomes of target setting based on clear and transparent measurement and evaluation.
• Reduce reputational, ethical, legal, operational, or regulatory risks in your nature and climate strategies.

It is highly recommended that you use the Stakeholder Engagement Guidance as a companion to your target-setting journey. The guidance is structured into four sections:

1. Guidance on how to identify the different groups of stakeholders to engage with and to understand factors such as intersectionality and the heterogeneity internal to each of these groups.
2. Key concepts and approaches supporting SBTN’s Steps 1, 2, and 4, related to preparatory work, stakeholder mapping, design and execution, and enabling participation.
3. Advice on how to integrate the voices of affected stakeholders as you implement Steps 3 and 5, and on how to identify and navigate potential conflicting interests and trade-offs that may arise in the process.
4. Guidance on how to evaluate your stakeholder engagement process, including indicators to assess its potential contribution to reaching your targets and guidance on how to identify learning and improvement opportunities.