Business and biodiversity: Measurement of an ambiguous goal
Type
conference contribution
Date Issued
2024-06-03
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. Increasingly, biodiversity loss threatens the natural foundations of businesses and the overall well-being of societies. However, while critical, the relationship between biodiversity and business is neither fully understood nor easily measured as it requires knowledge of biophysical and geospatial data. 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 six main categories of importance when measuring biodiversity: 1) organizational impacts on ecosystem, 2) organizational impacts on species, 3) ecosystem dependence, and 4) species dependence, 5) ecosystem impacts on organizations, and 6) species impacts on organizations. We delve into each category, describe measurement implications, highlight the main data sources, and examine the geographical scale of data sources. We make a methodological contribution by using geographic information system (GIS) data to connect biodiversity data to locations of organization facilities. Finally, we derive practically relevant measurement goals from our framework.
Language
English (United States)
Event Title
16th Annual ARCS Research Conference
Event Location
UCLA Anderson School of Management in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Event Date
02.06-05.06.2024
Division(s)
Contact Email Address
kerrigan.unter@unisg.ch