Browsing by Author "Kämäräinen, Kaisa"

The purpose of this study was to study the current biodiversity management practices in three large size companies and to study the biggest challenges the case companies are facing regarding biodiversity management. Biodiversity loss has been discussed for decades, but in only in recent years biodiversity has been more discussed also from more strategic point of view in the corporate world. The private sector has a considerable impact on biodiversity as well as a large part of the capacity to slow down and change the direction of biodiversity loss. Therefore, it is important that also the private sector considers and manages its impacts on biodiversity. The study was conducted as a qualitative case study including three case companies. The data was gathered through half-structured questionnaires through Microsoft Forms, a one-hour distance discussion with each of the companies, and from the latest annual reports in the fall of 2020. The results showed that biodiversity is considered to be an important topic among the case companies and that they are increasingly considering their impact on biodiversity as well. All case companies expect regulation on biodiversity to increase in the future and also the stakeholder demand around the topic has increased. However, only one of the companies has considered their impacts on biodiversity for years already; they have a management plan and they are following a specific reporting framework. Two of the companies have started to consider biodiversity separately or as a part of their other sustainability topics but they do not yet have biodiversity management plans in place nor do they follow any specific reporting framework. Regarding the biggest difficulties, the results show that especially finding suitable indicators and measuring the impacts on biodiversity are considered difficult. The results also show that understanding the concept of biodiversity and how biodiversity is related to the business is difficult. Companies also see that there is a lot of information regarding biodiversity available, but knowledge on how to use it for managing biodiversity is lacking. The results as well as the literature review indicate that impacts on biodiversity is increasingly managed but there are difficulties that need to be overcome. There are several biodiversity management frameworks that can be used for assessing the impacts and building suitable management plans. The better understanding companies have on their impacts biodiversity and vice versa, the better. It must be noted that the results indicate the views of large size (over 40 million € net revenue) companies in sectors that have rather direct impact on biodiversity. Therefore, the results may differ when studying companies of different sizes and from other sectors.