Whether we work in small, office-based businesses or have complex, outsourced supply chains, the concept of ‘nature impacts’ can feel very abstract.
However, as business activities are the number one cause of environmental degradation, it’s critical we start to contextualise these and understand how our businesses impact ecosystems in specific locations.
Most of our business’ impacts is in our supply chains. However we can begin to understand what these impacts may look like, by creating a case study using easily accessible (and universal) corporate geographic data: our (home) office address.
Start by inputting your office's address into the free WWF biodiversity risk filter tool. This will act as an initial nature risk screening exercise: helping you understand the level of nature risk associated with the location in which the office is situated.
If your office is in an area of medium to high nature risk, start to think about how the office may be contributing to this. A tangible entry point can be to think about the pollution your office is creating or contributing to. Below are some examples of environmentally polluting factors you could consider:
All of these types of pollution place stress on ecosystems, for example:
Light pollution: negatively impacts species by disrupting their natural behaviours, breeding patterns, and migration routes. It can also affect their ability to find food, navigate, and even interfere with their daily sleep/wake cycles (circadian rhythms). Specifically, many nocturnal species, including bats, moths, and owls, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of artificial light.
Noise pollution: negatively impacts species by disrupting their communication, foraging, and navigation, potentially leading to stress and hearing damage. It can also alter species' migration routes.
Water pollution: not all the water associated with your business goes into the sewage system. The sediment and chemical pollution caused by urban runoff from buildings and roads can affect aquatic plants, insects, fish and other wildlife. For example through dislodging aquatic plants, smother insects and fish eggs, damage or clog fish gills.
Air pollution: can cause respiratory problems and other health issues in animals, making them more vulnerable to disease and impacting their overall health.
This exercise by no means gives you a complete picture of your nature impacts, but it hopefully gets you to start thinking about the relationship between your business and the ecosystems in which it operates.
Once you have completed the exercise above, now think about a site that your business is reliant on, but that you don’t have direct access to, or may not have exact geographic data (e.g. in China but don’t know where).
Ask yourself the following questions:
- How might the business activities being conducted at this site contribute to local pollution? You can always Google the type of pollution likely associated with business activities like manufacturing, agricultural processes, warehousing, shipping etc.
- Is the site located in a country with more or less robust regulations than your office? How might this impact the likelihood of pollution entering local ecosystems and waterways?
- What is the WWF nature risk rating for the site / region / country?
Again, this is only a very small part of mapping your business' nature impacts, but hopefully it gets you thinking about the relationship between your business and the impacts it has on the locations within its value chain.
*For sake of ease, we’re not going to look at direct or indirect inputs in this exercise or introduce the concepts of ecosystem typologies or ecosystem integrity. But watch this space: we will be writing blogs on these soon!
You have come to the place for thought leadership.
