Biodiversity loss and global strategy of multinational enterprises

Start date: 2 September 2024
End date: 31 August 2026
Principal investigator: Dr Ziko Konwar
Co-investigators: Professor Annie (Yingqi) Wei, Professor Frank McDonald (Leeds University Business School); Dr.Christopher Hassall (Biological Sciences); Professor George Holmes (Earth & Environment); Professor Ulf Andersson (Mälardalen University, Sweden)
Postgraduate researcher: Sicily Fiennes

Green leaves in front of office buildings

Description

Biodiversity risk, defined as the ‘escalating and unsustainable economic and societal reliance on natural capital’, engendered by multinational enterprises (MNEs) and their multifaceted operations worldwide, is regarded as the 3rd most severe global risk after climate action failure and extreme weather (WEF, 2022; Biodiversity Intactness Index, 2023).

For context, MNEs and their subsidiaries contribute just above 37% of global production, including two thirds of global exports and more than 50% of global imports (Tintelnot, 2017; De Backer et al., 2019).

Despite private sector pledges and government-sponsored incentives to mitigate such risk, only 29% of listed companies globally have adopted investment policies to promote biodiversity positive practices, as of 2018 (Carvalho et al., 2018).

Over the forthcoming decade, the environmental and societal consequences of MNE activity will manifest through the degradation of ecosystems, jeopardizing the diversity and survival of animal and plant species (Wagner, 2022). However, corporations rate biodiversity management as a low priority (Schaltegger et al., 2023), and the role of corporations and economic development has been understudied in conservation biology (Jucker et al., 2018).

Furthermore, the involvement of capitalism in conservation has become increasingly divisive in the conservation community (Holmes et al., 2017).

By integrating a cross-disciplinary team of experts from International Business, Conservation Biology and Political Ecology, this proposed research aims to answer the following topical research questions:

How does the speed of new discoveries using indigenous ‘location-bound’ species and subsequent intellectual property (IP) protection by MNEs, i.e., via bioprospecting, influence rate of biodiversity loss?
How do central actors within the MNE headquarters-subsidiary network influence investment policies to endorse biodiversity-positive practices, such as promoting species diversity and extinction prevention?
Which taxonomy of species will be better supported (and neglected) within the context of such investments?

This project is funded by the Cheney Fellowship Scheme.

Publications and outputs

Contact

Dr Ziko Konwar