Person: Duke, Constanze
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Duke
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Constanze
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Duke, Constanze
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Publication Science in the Boardroom: A Road Map for Context-Based Environmental Targets in California Organizations(2016-04-28) Duke, Constanze; Leighton, Mark; Braaten, Kyle J.Today more than ever, organizations are expected to actively participate in solving the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. Yet the continuing degradation of ecological systems indicates that organizational improvement targets are either absent or ineffective. Acknowledging that deep understanding of ecological concepts falls outside of the core competencies of most companies, I intend to demonstrate the feasibility of setting effective emissions, water and especially biodiversity targets by leveraging existing data, standards and methods. The proposed road map aims to remove the scientific complexities that impede organizational adoption of adequate strategies, while grounding targets in their environmental context. The context-based approach emphasizes that the attainment of sustainable conditions requires environmental targets to be relative to absolute ecological capacity and resource availability. This concept, though not new, recently gained traction in the form of science-based greenhouse gas emissions targets following the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. Several methodologies are freely available for setting meaningful reduction targets in order to address this severe global risk. Water and biodiversity targets, on the other hand, must be based in regional resource availability and ecological conditions, rendering the goal-setting process much more complex. To find out to what extent organizations have embraced context-based target-setting, I analyzed a set of 123 companies and 33 university campuses in California, which is known for its high biodiversity value and progressive environmental policies. My research indicates that only 11% of California-based companies reported adequate emissions reduction targets in 2014 and half of them were not on track to meet them. Water and biodiversity targets fared even worse with water targets being mostly meaningless and biodiversity remaining largely absent from the environmental target set. In fact, only 10% of companies reported water targets in 2013 and 2014, while only 2% of public and 3% of private companies released quantitative biodiversity targets. The analysis also revealed numerous improvement opportunities for the collection and presentation of environmental data to facilitate research activities and risk assessment of non-financial indicators by organizational stakeholders. Additionally, context-based methods for target-setting presently rely on economic indicators to allocate share of accountability. The enormous variation in net-value contribution by organizations to society has yet to be accounted for. I address this shortcoming by introducing the idea of a stakeholder-driven assessment of organizational value. Furthermore, based on the abysmal recognition of biodiversity as a material impact, I examined global and regional biodiversity efforts, conservation budgeting needs, and best practices in pursuit of ecological sustainability. I then merged my findings into a California-specific biodiversity action plan that omits complex scientific information in favor of actionable strategies and KPIs. The protocol proposes broad guidelines for determining biodiversity budgets and traditional metrics for tracking program components, thereby facilitating integration into existing corporate performance frameworks. Despite various limitations and challenges that have yet to be resolved, the development of thoughtful and informed targets is not only of vital importance for the attainment of ecological equilibrium and organizational longevity, but entirely within current organizational capabilities.