Three United Nations conferences most of us will never hear the details of are already shaping what Guernsey businesses pay, how they’re assessed for risk, and what our clients ask of us. It’s Environmental COP season, three summits running back-to-back through to November, where the countries signed up to each UN environmental treaty come together to negotiate what happens next.
It’s tempting to think that distant negotiations are of little relevance to a small island in the Channel Islands. Each conference, however, touches something Guernsey businesses already deal with: the price and reliability of what we import, the questions our clients ask, and the decisions we make about our own natural environment in Guernsey.
Land, drought and the shelf price of everything
The UN Convention to Combat Desertification’s COP17 at the end of August focused on drought and food security – abstract-sounding until you look at English farms this summer, forced into early harvests and winter feed months ahead of schedule. Guernsey imports around 98% of what it consumes, so a poor harvest abroad doesn’t stay ‘over there’ – it reaches us as tighter stocks, renegotiated contracts and higher prices on the shelves, a few months down the line.
This year’s focus was on how to cover the cost of land restoration and drought resilience for grasslands and pastures that cover over half the planet’s surface. Agreement couldn’t be reached, so the decision’s been pushed to COP18 in 2028 – leaving the impact, and the cost, creeping ever closer to our supply chains and food prices.
For retailers, hospitality businesses and food producers, this is a commercial problem as much as an environmental one: knowing where key products come from, and supply-chain risks ahead, now belongs in ordinary purchasing decisions. It’s also a reminder that what Guernsey grows itself becomes more valuable, not less, when import supply chains are under strain.
The nature summit with a local angle
This year’s Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP17 (19–30 October) is now only weeks away, and it has a more direct Guernsey connection after the UK extended the Convention to Guernsey last year. Its focus includes how to raise money to protect nature through ‘nature credits’ for private capital and habitat-banking, questions Guernsey’s own finance and property sectors are starting to ask.
The direction of travel is visible across the water: demonstrating how nature is being improved, not just not affected, by developments is now a standard UK planning requirement, and habitat data is fast becoming as routine as a drainage survey.
Guernsey is one of the few jurisdictions in the western world without dedicated wildlife law, though maybe this political term is when that changes. In the meantime, we already have a Strategy for Nature, and in 2024 the Guernsey Nature Commission published the island’s first State of Nature report, giving us a clearer picture of what’s important and what needs better protection.
There’s a commercial upside too. In 2025, 85% of leisure visitors named Guernsey’s natural beauty and beaches as a reason for visiting, and more than half of islanders visit a beach weekly, the better we look after those ‘natural assets’, the more economic work they can do for tourism and hospitality.
Climate action, controversy, and who foots the bill
The climate conference COP31 in November this year is the best-known of the three, and often the most controversial – from well-known figures travelling to the summit by private jet, to whether hosts are there to change the world or sell more fossil fuels. The event brings countries together to review progress under the Paris Agreement – the commitment to hold warming well below 2°C and pursue 1.5°C – along with finance and emission-reduction targets.
This year will be of particular interest as it is the first climate COP since the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement took effect on 27 January 2026, removing one of the world’s largest economies and emitters from the negotiations. Will countries keep delivering without US federal leadership? Expect a harder-edged discussion than usual about real delivery, investment, and who pays.
For Guernsey’s finance, fiduciary and insurance sectors, international clients, lenders and insurers use environmental information to price risk and make capital decisions. As national policy shifts, so do their questions – what your business is doing about climate risk, an unexpected question about an overseas asset, a different view on a sector once thought reliable.
Preparation and collaboration
What can we be doing in the meantime? None of this replaces commercial judgement, but my clients have found that businesses that see the direction of travel early can answer calmly rather than scramble to catch up when lenders ask questions on how your business is managing climate and nature risks, suppliers raise prices, and supply chains start to create a business resilience risk.
Businesses that get ahead of this win contracts, win investment, and win the argument for why Guernsey is worth doing business in. That’s the real choice COP season puts in front of us.
The Guernsey Chamber of Commerce Sustainable Business Initiative exists to give members a place to ask questions and discuss what these decisions mean in practice. So get in touch, check the Chamber website, come along to our next SBI event or People Planet Pint, and look out for our COP31 debrief later in the year.
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