Revise and Resubmit: Journal of Business Ethics
Biodiversity metrics built for corporate finance aggregate the harms of a supply chain into a single score, and a single score cannot tell an investor which species, in which places, its capital puts at risk. We treat that as a governance problem rather than a measurement problem, and we separate its two halves: visibility, what a firm knows about where its impacts fall, and transparency, what it discloses, to whom, and to what end. We do not claim that biodiversity is uniquely hard to measure; we claim that it is distinctively damaged by aggregation, because species and places are not fungible in the way a tonne of CO2e is. Answering the call by Hockerts and Searcy (2023) to sharpen the discourse on corporate sustainability, we ask under what organizational and political conditions biodiversity measurement becomes ethically meaningful. Aggregation widens moral distance; we appraise nSTAR, a species-level extinction-risk metric that currently resolves supply chains only to country and sector, weighing its advantages against its assumptions, its biases, and the organizational constraints that limit it. Spatial resolution, we conclude, is necessary but not sufficient: no metric collapses the distance between the boardroom and the biosphere, and a record that makes that distance transparent still needs a standard-setter that makes not-knowing costly, an owner with standing to instruct, and disclosure that reaches the places where the harm falls.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6355060
with A. Balogh, W. Geary, B. Wintle (University of Melbourne), S. Bekessy
(RMIT University), M. Burgman (University of Hawaii), H. Layman (FTSE Russell) and O. Karakaş (University of Cambridge, Judge Business School)
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