Abstract
AbstractTo halt the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, various actors including companies need to engage, but it is not yet clear what drives voluntary business commitments. We explore leverage points that might increase corporate action for conservation. We apply a structural equation model based on the theory of planned behaviour to analyse data from 618 German companies, collected through an online‐survey in 2019. We show that a favourable attitude, driven by perceived business relevance and benefit prospects, fosters engagement. Perceived difficulties, such as lacking finances and knowledge, hinder the engagement. Customers, employees and the general public are presently the only stakeholder groups that drive corporate conservation engagement. Nevertheless, the expectation levels of virtually all stakeholders were found to be quite low and as such inadequate for the ecological crisis we face. We discuss how political will and goal setting can encourage more widespread business support for the natural environment.
Highlights
Companies' actions play a crucial role in the quest for sustainable development, not just because of their social and environmental impacts and because of their transformative and financial power
We focus on voluntary contributions that directly aim at protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services
It is perceivable that this makes conservation initiatives of larger companies more likely; (3) the position of the survey participant: This controls for a potential model bias, dependent on the information provider, such as executives, marketing or environmental managers; (4) the business sector: Because companies are affected by environmental degradation to various extents (F&C Asset Management, 2004), environmentally sensitive companies might be more active for nature protection; and (5) the company's ownership type, for example, owner-managed or stock listed: It could be assumed that owner-managed companies are more likely committed to nature conservation, for instance, due to the personal values of executives (Maggioni & Santangelo, 2017)
Summary
Companies' actions play a crucial role in the quest for sustainable development, not just because of their social and environmental impacts and because of their transformative and financial power. By mid-2020, nearly 400 companies worldwide have joined the 2019 internationally established Business for Nature coalition, in which they publicly commit to stop the loss of nature Despite these developments and existing examples of corporate biodiversity engagement, we are still on the fast track to losing biodiversity due to, among others, a significant lack of available funding and wider business support (Barbier, Burgess, & Dean, 2018; Smith et al, 2019). Some previous research assessed factors influencing environmental management, which typically refers to business operations, such as waste reduction or green technology, for example, Eiadat and Fernández Castro (2018), Ervin, Wu, Khanna, Jones, and Wirkkala (2013), González-Benito and González-Benito (2006), and Muduli et al (2020) These papers highlight the importance of managers' personal proenvironmental motivations, stakeholder pressures and regulation. This paper sets out to explore the following research questions: 1. What characterises companies that are voluntarily engaged for nature conservation?
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