Doing Business Within Planetary Boundaries

This report can help you to understand how businesses and investors can address the climate and nature crisis by shifting how they measure corporate activities. The report is a collaborative effort from the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Stockholm Resilience Centre, and the Biosphere Program at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and is the result of decades of collaborative and transdisciplinary research combining ecological economics, resilience science, and Earth system science with sustainable finance. The report argues that focusing attention narrowly on companies' most financially material environmental impacts impedes the assessment of cumulative environmental impacts. This undermines the ability to gauge where we are in relation to planetary limits, and is likely to lead to unreliable assessments of climate and nature-related risks and the inability to set informed targets. The report explains how anchoring corporate activities in the planetary boundaries framework can help businesses to drive sustainable transformation, and explains how more fulsome and accurate information about corporate environmental impacts and risk can support this. The report provides an overview of key features that characterise meaningful environmental disclosures as well as science- and sector-based guidance for prioritisation of data collection and disclosing essential environmental impacts. It also provides insights into a new science-based tool, the Earth System Impact score (ESI), which provides information on how a company’s local environmental impacts translate into global effects on climate and nature and can help businesses identify key areas for improving environmental performance and facilitating the development of strategic plans to enhance sustainability.