Dataset Information

Using conservation science to advance corporate biodiversity accountability.

ABSTRACT: Biodiversity declines threaten the sustainability of global economies and societies. Acknowledging this, businesses are beginning to make commitments to account for and mitigate their influence on biodiversity and report this in sustainability reports. We assessed the top 100 of the 2016 Fortune 500 Global companies' (the Fortune 100) sustainability reports to gauge the current state of corporate biodiversity accountability. Almost half (49) of the Fortune 100 mentioned biodiversity in reports, and 31 made clear biodiversity commitments, of which only 5 were specific, measureable, and time bound. A variety of biodiversity-related activities were disclosed (e.g., managing impacts, restoring biodiversity, and investing in biodiversity), but only 9 companies provided quantitative indicators to verify the magnitude of their activities (e.g., area of habitat restored). No companies reported quantitative biodiversity outcomes, making it difficult to determine whether business actions were of sufficient magnitude to address impacts and were achieving positive outcomes for nature. Conservation science can advance approaches to corporate biodiversity accountability by helping businesses make science-based biodiversity commitments, develop meaningful indicators, and select more targeted activities to address business impacts. With the biodiversity policy super year of 2020 rapidly approaching, now is the time for conservation scientists to engage with and support businesses in playing a critical role in setting the new agenda for a sustainable future for the planet with biodiversity at its heart.

SUBMITTER: Addison PFE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7379537 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Using conservation science to advance corporate biodiversity accountability.

Addison Prue F E PFE Bull Joseph W JW Milner-Gulland E J EJ

Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology 20181005 2

Biodiversity declines threaten the sustainability of global economies and societies. Acknowledging this, businesses are beginning to make commitments to account for and mitigate their influence on biodiversity and report this in sustainability reports. We assessed the top 100 of the 2016 Fortune 500 Global companies' (the Fortune 100) sustainability reports to gauge the current state of corporate biodiversity accountability. Almost half (49) of the Fortune 100 mentioned biodiversity in reports, ...[more]

PMID: 30009509

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Project description:The study of biodiversity has grown exponentially in the last thirty years in response to demands for greater understanding of the function and importance of Earth's biodiversity and finding solutions to conserve it. Here, we test the hypothesis that biodiversity science has become more interdisciplinary over time. To do so, we analyze 97,945 peer-reviewed articles over a twenty-two-year time period (1990-2012) with a continuous time dynamic model, which classifies articles into concepts (i.e., topics and ideas) based on word co-occurrences. Using the model output, we then quantify different aspects of interdisciplinarity: concept diversity, that is, the diversity of topics and ideas across subdisciplines in biodiversity science, subdiscipline diversity, that is, the diversity of subdisciplines across concepts, and network structure, which captures interactions between concepts and subdisciplines. We found that, on average, concept and subdiscipline diversity in biodiversity science were either stable or declining, patterns which were driven by the persistence of rare concepts and subdisciplines and a decline in the diversity of common concepts and subdisciplines, respectively. Moreover, our results provide evidence that conceptual homogenization, that is, decreases in temporal β concept diversity, underlies the observed trends in interdisciplinarity. Together, our results reveal that biodiversity science is undergoing a dynamic phase as a scientific discipline that is consolidating around a core set of concepts. Our results suggest that progress toward addressing the biodiversity crisis via greater interdisciplinarity during the study period may have been slowed by extrinsic factors, such as the failure to invest in research spanning across concepts and disciplines. However, recent initiatives such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) may attract broader support for biodiversity-related issues and hence interdisciplinary approaches to address scientific, political, and societal challenges in the coming years.

Dataset Information

Using conservation science to advance corporate biodiversity accountability.

Publications

Using conservation science to advance corporate biodiversity accountability.

Similar Datasets

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