Elegant Equations
Love makes the world go around, but business has a part to play, too. And while love can do no wrong, business certainly can. Companies come in many shapes. The fruit stand at the town square is a business. So are Nestlé and ExxonMobil. Different sizes, different impacts. Regardless of scale, running a business is, at its core, an equation. The numbers have to add up. If they don’t, the business runs out of energy, withers and dies.
The question is: what numbers go into the equation?
Imagine a company that develops a fantastic new product, markets it successfully, and makes good money. Everyone at the company is paid well. The distributors are happy. Customers love it. Sounds great.
However, there’s just one little thing: the production process poisons a river. A river that used to sustain life. Its calming sound, sadly, was never heard in the boardrooms.
For too long, many large companies have ignored and silenced nature’s voice. Plants don’t talk. Rivers can’t protest. A dead bird makes no sound.
This target — and common sense — suggests that a more elegant equation is possible. A business model where everybody wins: people, ecosystems, and future generations. It is not a fantasy. Business has created real value for millennia, long before technology made it possible to destroy life on Earth at scale.
Will this transition be easy? Not necessarily, but that’s irrelevant. Excellence was never meant to be easy. Making things better has always required hard work. Isn’t that exactly how all CEOs around the world justify their salaries? And besides — what choice do we have? It’s about staying alive.
Another way to look at it: the easiest way to get rich is to steal. But we don’t admire that. So why do we accept it when it comes to nature?
Robin Wall Kimmerer:
“As human beings, we are part of the web of life, not its masters. Our role is to care for the diversity of life forms on Earth, to be in relationship with them, and to recognize their value beyond our use.”
This target has three parts, each important enough to deserve its own. It calls for laws and policies to ensure that businesses — especially large, international companies and financial institutions — take the following steps:
To monitor and openly share risks, dependencies, and impacts on biodiversity — covering their operations, supply chains, value chains, and portfolios.
To help consumers make more sustainable consumption choices.
To Use natural resources fairly, share the benefits, and move toward fully sustainable production.
The design tells us that all that is healthy grows.
Business should be like branches on a tree, not the saw that cuts it down.
Reduce Businesses’ Negative Impacts on Biodiversity
Take legal, administrative or policy measures to encourage and enable business, and in particular to ensure that large and transnational companies and financial institutions:
(a) Regularly monitor, assess, and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies and impacts on biodiversity, including with requirements for all large as well as transnational companies and financial institutions along their operations, supply and value chains, and portfolios;
(b) Provide information needed to consumers to promote sustainable consumption patterns;
(c) Report on compliance with access and benefit-sharing regulations and measures, as applicable; in order to progressively reduce negative impacts on biodiversity, increase positive impacts, reduce biodiversity-related risks to business and financial institutions, and promote actions to ensure sustainable patterns of production.