Background
Because of its nature of a common public good, the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services is especially seen as a governmental task. Usually, enterprises don’t pay for their consumption of biodiversity and ecosystem services due to their normal economic activity. Accordingly these factors don’t go down in their entrepreneurial accounting and there are only a few efforts to assess environmental impacts of enterprises or the possession of natural capital.
Since 2011, interest on the “worth of natural capital” is growing and there has been a lot of movement in the world of business. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) published the Guide to Corporate Ecosystem Valuation, a guideline how enterprises should proceed by evaluating ecosystem services. Afterwards, in may 2011, the fashion- and shoe-producer PUMA from Herzogenaurach media effectively published its ecological profit and loss account to present itself as an environmental-economic pioneer.
During previous approaches of enterprises to enhance the ecological worth, two different procedures can be recognised. First, an environmental-economic evaluation can be used to find support in an internal decision-making. The range of application reaches at the moment from Holcim, a construction materials group that made an ecological cost benefit calculation for the enlargement and subsequent renaturation of a mining site to AkzoNobel, a chemical industry which could compare two different fabrication methods with the monetary evaluation of environmental impacts.
Otherwise a case like PUMA and the parent group PPR can show that the whole ecological performance of an enterprise can be properly focused. The sustainability of a brand can, on the basis of environmental ecological evaluation criterions, either be proven or rebutted and can prospectively be compared with the performance of competitors.
In its ecological cost benefit calculation PUMA observed the five subjectively most relevant environmental indicators: Greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, land consumption, air pollution and waste generation. Not only the Bavarian headquarter but all stages of the value chain were observed, even till the production of the raw materials like cotton and leather in South America and Asia.