Business and biodiversity: Measurement of an ambiguous goal
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2024
Author(s)
Abstract
Biodiversity serves as a silent partner to businesses by nurturing critical resources, providing natural infrastructure, and fostering an environment in which industries and businesses thrive. However, biodiversity loss is accelerating and threatens not only the natural foundations of businesses but also ecological and societal well-being. While critical, the relationship between biodiversity and business is not fully understood nor easily measured as it requires knowledge of biophysical and geospatial data. For businesses to accurately assess their environmental impact, comply with regulations and certification requirements, manage risks, and take meaningful actions to preserve and restore nature, they need ways to measure it. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework for measuring biodiversity impacts and dependencies of businesses across ecosystems and species. We develop this framework through the lens of the natural resource dependence theory (NRDT), extending the boundary conditions of NRDT to include biodiversity as a source of uncertainty that affects organizational strategies and performance. Based on our framework, we offer four main categories of importance when measuring biodiversity: 1) ecosystem impacts, 2) species impacts, 3) materiality, and 4) species dependence. We delve into each component of our 2x2 matrix, describe measurement implications, highlight the main data sources, and examine the geographical scale of data sources. As a result, we extend the NRDT by providing means to measure both impacts and dependencies of organizations on biodiversity. We make a methodological contribution by using geographic information system (GIS) data to connect biodiversity data to locations of business operations. Finally, we derive measurement goals from our framework that can be of use in practice.
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