Aims

The UK is a signatory to the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) which set international goals to address ongoing biodiversity loss. These include a requirement on large and transnational companies and financial institutions to regularly monitor, assess and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies and impact on biodiversity emanating from their operations, supply chains and portfolios.  

Many global businesses are struggling with how to identify and assess their impacts and dependencies on nature. In our work with CBI’s research The Nature of Business, we found that businesses are grappling with the complexity of the issues and a lack of guidance. This PhD research will dig deeper into how managerial decision-makers within business to make sense of the complexity of biodiversity loss and their role in addressing the problem. 

This PhD research aims to

• Understand how business managers arrive at decisions relating to biodiversity impacts, and how businesses embed biodiversity considerations in their operations
  
• Understand the drivers that prompt business action on biodiversity 
  
• Explore how individuals’ personalised ecologies and embeddedness in an ecological area shape and influence their decision-making process in a business environment 
  
• Explore how organisational cultures and sub-cultures affect sustainable management practices within organisations.
  

Approach

This PhD research will use a blend of different qualitative methods, including interviews, archival research, and in-depth engagement with individual managers.

Next Steps

We are currently recruiting research participants. Please contact renew@exeter.ac.uk if your company would like to be involved. We hope that the findings from this research will inform the development of resources and support for business leaders.  

Other RENEW activity in this space includes working to integrate biodiversity resilience into impact metrics used by business, and developing a methodology using the Life Cycle Assessment approach to quantify biodiversity impacts.