Ladakh, India. Christopher Michel [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published on DNV GL.
“A year ago in London, the Natural Capital Coalition launched a universal protocol for businesses to measure and value their impacts and dependencies on nature. Why is the ‘Natural Capital Protocol’ such a vital step in transforming business for tomorrow’s world? Indeed, in a market-based, trade-deregulated, technology-empowered, globalized, constantly innovating economy, such as we have today, why should having such a Protocol matter at all?
Why measure impacts and dependencies on nature?
Last year, in India, severe drought inflicted huge costs to the nation’s economy3 with agriculture and hydropower sectors being particularly badly hit4. One of the worst affected states was Maharashtra (Mumbai is its capital city) which had to cut water supply to industry by up to a half, forcing many manufacturing businesses large and small to shut down. Business dependency on nature’s freshwater cycle, now disrupted by a changing climate, could not have been more painfully felt.
Mainstream scientific opinion is that climate change is driven largely by anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, of which the lion’s share is emitted by the private sector. Thus the cumulative impacts of dominant business models in major sectors such as fossil-fuelled energy, transportation, construction, conventional agriculture and animal husbandry are now being felt in the form of costly disruptions of the otherwise benign environmental conditions that have enabled development across many sectors and countries, including manufacturing in India. This development is now seriously at risk…”
Read on at: DNV GL.
