Understanding changes in business strategies regarding biodiversity and ecosystem services

Joel Houdet (), Michel Trommetter and Jacques Weber

Ecological Economics, 2012, vol. 73, issue C, 37-46

Abstract: Business activities play a major role in biodiversity loss so that firms are under increasing pressures from stakeholders to mitigate their negative impacts on ecosystems. As business attitudes, policies and behaviors regarding biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) progressively change, a better understanding of how business strategies may be framed and implemented is required. In the first part of this paper, we discuss how biodiversity is usually understood as an external environmental constraint on business activities, and how this perception influences arbitrages. We then discuss how assessing BES interdependencies (impacts and dependencies) may bring about new business strategies and needs: we explore the opportunities and challenges of emerging mechanisms of payments for ecosystem services and expose the need for standardized sets of indicators at different scales for the effective management of their BES dependencies and impacts.

Keywords: Biodiversity; Ecosystem services; Business; Strategy; Stakeholders; Tools; Impact mitigation; Payments for ecosystem services; Property rights; Indicators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:73:y:2012:i:c:p:37-46

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2011.10.013

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