Ensuring biodiversity is important to building sustainable businesses
In the lead up to the International Day of Biological Diversity on May 22nd, I wanted to talk a little bit about why the concept of biodiversity is so important to creating sustainable businesses. Biodiversity is essentially the variety of animals, plants, fungi, and all living microorganisms in a given area. Each species provide benefit to the wider ecosystem to maintain balance and support life in the shared area. While the individual relationships can be complex and hard to discern their value to the whole, the results of the complete and biodiverse ecosystem can be quite significant. Healthy ecosystems can help clean air and water, provide flooding control, pollinate vegetation, help food production, act as a carbon store, and more.
The benefits of maintaining a healthy and biodiverse ecosystem are numerous, but their ability to continue doing so is being disrupted by the climate crisis. Over a quarter of assessed lifeforms are already uncomfortably close to extinction, in turn endangering the health of their ecosystems and their productivity. And excessive losses to biodiversity could tip ecosystems beyond the point of recovery. While nature as a whole may recover from such changes, there are still shorter term problems for people and our place in the ecosystem. Over half of global GDP is moderately to highly dependent on healthy ecosystems, most notably with our food supply.
The opportunity in fostering biodiversity
Maintaining and even restoring biodiversity is not only a path to avoiding the struggles of collapsing ecosystems, but it also generates business opportunities. Building businesses with respect to biodiversity could be worth $10 trillion annually and create nearly 400 million new jobs. This path will boost brand reputations while supporting a better world for all. This is possible through developing products and solutions that create positive impact on biodiversity. By tapping into the growing awareness of the challenge ahead and the new market possibilities such as vertical farming, businesses will have ample opportunity to succeed in this healthier ecosystem.
The first step is in understanding the impact of a business. For example, the impact of the Siemens value chain is comprised of land and energy use, waste generation, and the emissions of volatile organic compounds. Because of our extensive supplier network a majority of the value chain impacts come from upstream and of that impact pollution is overwhelmingly our greatest contributor. While much of that can be minimized through more traditional means to sustainability, we are also promoting biodiversity where we can. Active biodiversity measures are being implemented at 200 of our own sites. We are developing resilient urban areas in Siemensstadt Square and Erlangen. There are also efforts to promote sustainable water managementand habitat restoration at our facilities.
Bringing biodiversity to sustainable industries
To help our customers and the wider ecosystem we occupy, we want to make sure every business can lead the way in helping to minimize the negative impacts on our ecosystem. That means designing products with their end-of-life in mind to reduce overall emissions and consumption. It is also about minimizing waste and pollution by increasing the rates of re-use and recycling of products, materials, and resources. There is the constant need to increase energy efficiency and reduce consumption in production. Water needs to be conserved while also reducing the impacts of chemical usage on our ecosystems. And we need to continue optimizing product lifecycles through services and product design such as modularity and secondary uses before recycling.
Making all of this happen will take effort, time, and reliable partners, but fortunately Siemens is already learning how to best make these changes. Sometimes through our own experiences, but also through our continued innovation on the software tools and hardware capabilities our customers rely on to build sustainable businesses. To learn more about biodiversity, the World Wildlife Fund, the World Economic Forum, and Earth.org are great resources. And to learn more about what Siemens is doing to promote biodiversity check out what we are doing at 200 of our own sites, as well as projects in devevloping resilient urban areas inSiemensstadt Square and Erlangen.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
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