The uncomfortable relationship between business and biodiversity: Advancing research on business strategies for biodiversity protection

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to stimulate research on business strategies for biodiversity protection. To that end, we first dispel a common misperception among business scholars that biodiversity loss is caused by only a few industries, clarifying that it is driven by practically all. Further, we organize corporate biodiversity protection strategies into four categories based on temporal and spatial dimensions, namely, conservation, restoration, compensation, and reparation. Finally, we illustrate the unsettled nature of the field and the continuing debates among conservation biologists about the best approaches to biodiversity management. We argue that (i) a firm's biodiversity protection strategy should aim to mitigate the primary driver through which the firm causes biodiversity loss; (ii) firms should report performance in each of the four biodiversity protection strategies separately; and (iii) interdisciplinary collaborations among corporate sustainability scholars and conservation biologists are critical to developing effective biodiversity protection strategies.