The Guardian, a leading UK newspaper, recently published an interesting analysis of biodiversity as the new “carbon”. After discussing how biodiversity has emerged as a new issue for companies to incorporate in their business strategies, the article details the main motivations for this.
The first motivation mentioned is reputational risk but the most interesting is the one concerning a company’s liability in case of impacts or damages on biodiversity. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (BP) is used as an example. This underlies two things:
The USA have developed assessment methods to be applied in the context of Natural Resource Damage Assessment procedures (NRDA), such as Habitat Equivalency Analysis and Resource Equivalency Analysis. In Europe, the 2004 Environmental Liability Directive will certainly make governments and environmental authorities push for the development of such methods.