The Planetary KPIs That Inform Eco-Friendly Strategies
A set of critical environmental measures will help business leaders identify where they can take action to mitigate risks and protect human health and safety.
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Frontiers
Beth Goody/theispot.com
Sustainability targets for many businesses often yield incremental improvements that focus on minimizing harm instead of generating positive impacts. The science-based Earth system boundaries, which define limits beyond which critical planetary systems will be destabilized, can be used as a framework to identify where to prioritize environmental sustainability efforts in a way that aligns with company strategy.
Monitoring the right metrics can help companies closely track changes in their markets and the broader operating environment, enabling them to identify opportunities early and reduce their exposure to material risks. As extreme weather events and other environmental changes accelerate, business leaders must factor these developments into their organizations’ goals and strategies — which means paying attention to key indicators tracked by natural scientists.
It should go without saying that significant long-term shifts in the planetary environment will have significant repercussions for the business environment. But outside of a few sectors where businesses are already exposed to greater environmental risks, such as those linked to climate change, these changes may be seen as too volatile and uncertain to plan for. The current U.S. administration’s hostility toward climate science and international efforts to mitigate global warming may further direct some business leaders’ attention away from this area of risk and opportunity. However, for those who remain dedicated to comprehensive strategic foresight, now is an opportune time to raise awareness of a publicly available set of KPIs that can help leaders monitor and plan for the broader business context: the Earth system boundaries (ESBs).
Recently extended to encompass not only the physical limits within which human life can be sustained on Earth but also the way planetary changes may disproportionally affect some groups and drive negative societal outcomes, the ESBs can be a valuable tool for business. Here, we provide a succinct outline of the ESBs and use examples to show how they can inform strategic foresight.
The Earth’s KPIs, and Why Companies Should Care
In a 2009 paper in the journal Nature, natural scientists identified nine planetary boundaries, each of which quantified the environmentally safe limits of human impact on a set of Earth system processes. These are not KPIs that we seek to achieve: Crossing planetary boundaries increases risks for humanity, and, indeed, by 2023, six of the nine planetary boundaries were already beyond safe thresholds. That same year, scientists published a new paper in Nature proposing a set of ESBs to help monitor both safety (the resilience and stability of the Earth system) and justice — that is, to
