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Nature Is No Longer “a nice to have,” It’s “a must-have”: A Mongabay Q&A with our Chairman André Hoffmann

April 23, 2021 |

This interview was published by Mongabay.

“André Hoffmann, from the family behind Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, has been pushing for environmental sustainability in business for a quarter of a century now.

Throughout a career that has also seen him serve as vice president of WWF, Hoffmann says he’s been bothered by the business-as-usual principle of making money first and thinking about nature afterward.

“If you destroy nature to make a profit then you are creating the problem that you then try to solve with philanthropy,” he says. “So, you need to be much better at sensibly making money rather than making money at all costs.”

In an interview with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler, Hoffmann talks about the growing realization of nature’s importance, the responsibility of companies to society beyond shareholders, and the need to transform the current, fragile economic system…”

Read on.

How does this connect to Capitals?

Andre Hoffman is the Chairman of the Coalition’s board and is a strong advocate for a capitals approach. In this interview he highlights the role of a capitals approach in transforming our economic model:

We need sustainable accountability based on the capitals: natural capital, social capital, human capital, which combined together end up in the produced capital, which is the one we’re measuring. By measuring only the produced capital at the end of the process, we do not allow each of the other three capitals to be given proper value...”

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