What Positive netto-impact actually means - H&M new promise and why you shouldn’t buy it
Photo: H&M Group
Of course it is good that companies, organisations or governmental bodies make promises and commitments regarding actions on climate change and biodiversity loss. Sometimes companies might not make promises or commitments, at least not public ones, since they might be misinterpreted and criticised. It’s almost like it doesn’t really matter what you do, everything you say can easily be interpreted as greenwashing. Somehow, that might be fair though, since several large companies in Sweden are far away from having a sustainable circular practice.
One of the latest commitments comes from H&M who says they want to have a positive netto impact on biodiversity. These news were published in accordance of the WWF Living Planet report publication. However, there’s a few challenges with the promise of “positive netto impact”.
If you search on the term you’ll realise that it has been widely used in relation to climate impact. By being climate neutral one has to follow the standard of ISO 14021 and PAS 2060 which means that all emissions from the whole lifecycle must be measured and compensated for. A standard for climate positive is currently being developed, but it basically means that a company must follow standards for climate neutral and climate compensate for more than their whole carbon footprint.
When it comes to biodiversity it becomes more complicated. Despite searching for standards regarding positive netto impact on biodiversity, asking sustainability professionals and consultancy’s, no one has ever heard of, or used such standard. H&M themselves says that the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), have to improve scientific tools and methodologies for this kind of work.
Even if there would be a standard and even if there’s better scientific tools to apply it doesn’t mean that this is a good way forward. Because netto impact basically means that you can add and subtract your companies impact on biodiversity. By adding the initiatives that contributes to higher biodiversity, maybe measuring increase in species richness, you’re increasing your biodiversity. At the same time you can keep on having business as usual in another part of the company where water might be polluted or forests might be cut which decreases biodiversity.
In worse case you can simply keep on doing what you’ve been doing as long as you pay for improvements of biodiversity somewhere else.
Humans are indeed creative but this has several issues. One of them is related to why biodiversity should be restored in some areas and not in others? That question is also linked to issues of fair, justice and equality, or let’s say the social sustainable development goals. Some societies in some areas might have their ecosystems restored while others not. The question also concerns what biodiversity could be exchange with what? Could a restoration of a lake in Sweden be enough to compensate for the pollution of a river in Bangladesh?
It’s good that H&M starts to cooperate with WWF and as a part of their promise they want to reduce harm in their value chain, but the terminology of netto impact is still complicated and focused should be on reducing harm and start using environmentally and socially friendly practices and materials according to standards.
It’s time for businesses to wake up. We can’t add economic terms on nature, we don’t have a common resource pool which we can add and subtract from. We only have one planet, there’s only one of that lake, that forest or that ecosystem. It would be better, much fairer and easier if we focused on reducing the harm we’re doing, re-invent business models and start to work with nature instead of treating it like a resource, it should be treated like our partner.