Changing business perceptions regarding biodiversity: from impact mitigation towards new strategies and practices

Business activities play a major role in biodiversity loss and, as a result, firms are under increasing pressures from stakeholders to reduce their negative impacts on living systems. In response, business attitudes, behaviors and strategies regarding biodiversity are progressively changing, suggesting that interactions between business and biodiversity could go beyond the search of a compromise between development and conservation. This paper proposes an analysis of business perceptions regarding biodiversity. In its first part, we discuss how biodiversity is usually perceived as an external environmental constraint on business activities, and how economic tools may be used for arbitrages in that context. Building upon our work on the Business and Biodiversity Interdependence Indicator (BBII), we then discuss how assessing a firm's interdependences with biodiversity may bring about new business strategies and practices. We propose a typology of firm behavior regarding biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES), discuss business opportunities and property rights issues pertaining to markets for ecosystem services and propose preliminary conceptual foundations of new business standards needed to reverse current biodiversity trends.