Business and biodiversity: The Next Step in Corporate Responsibility?

Despite the overall importance of biodiversity, the quality measures of biodiversity show worrying figures. Numerous human impacts on nature impose serious hazard to its inherent diversity. This expansion of human activities leaves the battle against loss of biodiversity to be a great challenge - a challenge that needs to be shared between conservationists, green organisations, public authorities, as well as the private sector.

A new wave of green initiatives has emerged within the culture of business and marketing. The reasons for why businesses should engage in environmental actions are many, but the effort has until now considered biodiversity actions relatively little, compared to other areas such as e.g. climate related actions.

Nevertheless, the opportunity for businesses to meet their responsibilities and lift a share of the challenge is far from being just a romantic thought. Nor is the challenge of engaging businesses in responsible actions. The core challenge is to create awareness of the environmental phenomenon biodiversity, inform about the significance of business involvement, and encourage the business world to participate in this process of protecting biodiversity as the valuable asset, which the world and its inhabitants cannot afford to stay loosing.

This paper focuses on how companies in Denmark in concrete ways can take responsibility for integrating initiatives that align protection of biodiversity with other, more traditional environmental management and corporate social responsibility (CSR) related activities.

The paper investigates the institutional setup for engaging in biodiversity actions from a business perspective, considers corporate values and priorities in proposing strategic changes in the favour of biodiversity concerns, and look at accessible and credible approaches to initiate effective strategic actions.