The survey of some 1,500 executives of companies in all global regions and industries found that 59% of respondents view biodiversity as an opportunity rather than a threat to their company. They identified opportunities to boost corporate reputations by taking action to preserve biodiversity or develop new products from renewable natural resources.
The results suggest that companies are now embracing biodiversity as the next big environmental issue, while never mustering the same enthusiasm for taking on climate change. When public debate was consumed with global warming in 2007, a similar McKinsey survey revealed that only 29% of executives saw their concern as more of an opportunity than a risk.
Just over half of respondents said their companies were addressing biodiversity, most often by publicising their use of renewable resources and reorganising their operations to reduce their impact on biodiversity.
McKinsey argued that the priority for operations has been confirmed by other surveys, suggesting that executives now recognise the real impact that environmental issues can have on operations and corporate value rather than approaching them as a simple PR threat.
Nevertheless, biodiversity ranked far behind climate change on the list of the most important environmental and sustainability issues for companies, coming behind concerns such as pollution and human rights.
In addition, a fairly small share of respondents predicted that biodiversity-related risks would become a significant threat to their companies in the next one to three years. Water scarcity was seen as the most likely risk, selected by 31% overall and nearly half of energy industry respondents.
In fact, companies were divided on the impact of biodiversity according to the nature of their operations. Over a third said they are not taking action to preserve biodiversity because it is not important enough and external pressure is lacking.
But respondents from companies producing food and beverages, which rely on water for agriculture, pharmaceutical firms with a vested interest in the development of treatments for infections diseases and energy companies whose operations directly affect biodiversity were twice as likely as others to identify biodiversity as an important factor in strengthening their competitive position, McKinsey said.
The results are in line with increasing concerns in the EU over biodiversity degradation, as the bloc was far from meeting its goal of halving biodiversity loss by 2010. The European Commission is to present a 2020 biodiversity strategy by the end of the year (EurActiv 20/01/10).
