What makes businesses commit to nature conservation?

Abstract

To halt the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, various actors including companies need to engage, but it is not yet clear what drives voluntary business commitments. We explore leverage points that might increase corporate action for conservation. We apply a structural equation model based on the theory of planned behaviour to analyse data from 618 German companies, collected through an online‐survey in 2019. We show that a favourable attitude, driven by perceived business relevance and benefit prospects, fosters engagement. Perceived difficulties, such as lacking finances and knowledge, hinder the engagement. Customers, employees and the general public are presently the only stakeholder groups that drive corporate conservation engagement. Nevertheless, the expectation levels of virtually all stakeholders were found to be quite low and as such inadequate for the ecological crisis we face. We discuss how political will and goal setting can encourage more widespread business support for the natural environment.

Intergenerational sustainability is enhanced by taking the perspective of future generations

“…Democracy and capitalism rarely require people to take the standpoint of future generations, even for intergenerational problems such as climate change and government debt, thus the decisions end up being mostly made from the current generation’s standpoint 8 , 13 , 14 , 23 , 75 – 77 . Corporations and private companies, as integral parts of capitalism, sometimes follow the same practices leading to undermining corporate sustainability, i.e., environmental integrity, social equity and economic prosperity 78 , 79 . Our findings imply that IS problems will worsen in the absence of a new mechanism to affect people’s cognitive and/or noncognitive processes.…”

Survey data on voluntary nature conservation commitments of German businesses and their perceptions towards conservation credits

“…dataset_complete . A first data analysis with a subset of the survey responses [1] was done with 618 questionnaires (3.76%), cf. subset_1 .…”

“…To view the original survey layout, please see " questionnaire_DE ". .pdf – subset_1 Subset of the " dataset_complete " used for analysis of factors that influence nature conservation commitments of companies [1] . .csv 618 subset_1_codebook Table containing codes of " subset_1 ″ as well as corresponding questions in German (original language) and English (translation).…”

“…A part of the survey data (“ subset_1 ″) has been analysed through structural equation modelling to investigate factors that influence companies’ voluntary nature conservation commitments [1] . The subset consists of 59 variables and 618 observations.…”

Using technology to improve the management of development impacts on biodiversity

“…The timeline for mitigation relative to the project timeline is illustrative and indicative of common practice, but can vary depending on the context. For example, offsets may be secured earlier and without a time-lag through biodiversity banking programs that are available in some countries [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] others, gaps in the availability, access, or awareness of relevant information on baselines and impacts (e.g., Jacob et al, 2016); high cost and/or low feasibility of collecting baseline and monitoring data (e.g., for bird and bat fatalities in offshore wind farms, Lindeboom et al, 2015, or cryptic species, Bain et al, 2014, Williams et al, 2018; absence of affordable and effective technical solutions for minimizing impacts (e.g., cost of burying power transmission lines to prevent bird collisions, Bernardino et al, 2018; ineffectiveness of fish ladders to maintain bi-directional migration, Agostinho et al, 2012); inadequate availability of finances and knowledge required for biodiversity impact mitigation (e.g., Krause et al, 2021); and limited empirical evidence for the effectiveness of mitigation options (Christie et al, 2020). The application of new technologies has potential to help overcome these challenges, increasing the feasibility and effectiveness of mitigation and monitoring (Bergal-Tal & Lahoz-Montfort, 2018;Joppa, 2015;Lahoz-Monfort et al, 2019;WILDLABS, 2016).…”