Analysis: the biodiversity footprint of the University of Oxford
To help to achieve ecological recovery worldwide, more multinational corporations are making commitments to biodiversity conservation. According to the most recent assessment in 2018, 31 of the 100 largest companies by revenue worldwide (the global Fortune 100) have done so, from the retail corporation Walmart to the insurance company AXA.
To deliver real gains — in the population sizes of endangered species, say, or in the number of hectares of restored forests, grasslands or wetlands — large organizations need to determine which of their activities have the greatest impacts on biodiversity. And they need to disclose and mitigate those impacts. Currently, methods for doing this are lacking (see ‘Promises are hard to keep’). (By large organizations, we mean formal entities composed of hundreds of people or more that act towards a certain purpose, whether in the public, private or non-profit sectors.)
