{"id":1177,"date":"2019-02-27T09:40:55","date_gmt":"2019-02-27T08:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/?p=1177"},"modified":"2019-02-27T09:40:55","modified_gmt":"2019-02-27T08:40:55","slug":"prue-addison-integrating-ecological-principles-into-business-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/2019\/02\/27\/prue-addison-integrating-ecological-principles-into-business-practice\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Prue Addison: Integrating Ecological Principles Into Business Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article is part of an ongoing series of interviews with prominent ecologists, which you can find\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/h3>\n

With the environmental movement having expanded so quickly over recent decades, it makes sense that many large corporations have started to incorporate sustainability and the environment into their business plans. But what are these business actions actually achieving? And who bridges the gap between the corporate world and the field of ecology?<\/b><\/h3>\n

At the recent Norwegian Ecological Society Conference, Tanja Petersen<\/a> and I sat down with Doctor Prue Addison<\/a> from the University of Oxford. Prue works with multinational corporations to aid them in integrating biodiversity considerations into their business operations. We asked her about the difference between business and academia, how she\u2019s managed to transition between the two, and advice for others looking to make the same leap.<\/b><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Prue Addison, who spoke at the recent Norwegian Ecological Society Conference<\/a>, is attempting to bring conservation science to ‘the dark side’\u00a0 – the world of business (Image Credit: Synchronicity Earth, CC BY 2.0)<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tanja Petersen (TP): A lot of your work involves helping businesses incorporate biodiversity into their business plans. How did you get into that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prue Addison (PA):<\/strong> There was an opportunity for me to apply for a fellowship specifically to work with businesses on biodiversity. I\u2019m currently at the University of Oxford on a Knowledge Exchange fellowship, but before that I\u2019d only ever worked with government agencies and NGOs, based in Australian academic institutions. So I saw working with businesses as a bit of a challenge, and thought I\u2019d give it a go.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a conservation scientist, and in our field, large corporations are viewed as the \u201cdark side\u201d. One approach is to not engage and shout from the sidelines about how bad these businesses are. The other is to try and reach out. I figured I\u2019d try the latter approach, and work with them.<\/p>\n

Sam Perrin (SP): You mentioned that business is seen as the dark side. Have you become more optimistic since working with businesses?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PA:<\/strong> Yeah. I think I have. There\u2019s a big mix of motivations for why businesses talk about biodiversity. Some of it is purely reputation-based and they just want a competitive edge over other companies. But there are companies which are genuinely doing interesting and good things, and appear to be making a real effort to understand what their impacts are, and mitigate these impacts by taking positive actions for biodviersity.<\/p>\n

SP: Take us through the concept of greenwashing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PA:<\/strong> Many businesses nowadays have corporate social responsibility or sustainability reports, which are designed to go alongside their financial reports. But say 10 years ago, they were mainly greenwashing, just a collection of environmental and social ideas that businesses claimed that they represented. They look nice and shiny from the outside, but when you look under the hood there\u2019s not much there. It\u2019s a front that they\u2019re putting on, and they\u2019re not actually doing anything genuinely beneficial for the environment or society.<\/p>\n

For example, Nestle. Some people think that it\u2019s a really bad company, but it\u2019s made a lot of environmental commitments, a lot of efforts around crop genetics and diversity, and they have started to account for natural capital in their supply chains. But it has done some really really bad things in the past<\/a> as well. So you look at their sustainability report, it looks great and focuses on the positive things they\u2019ve been doing, but it hides the scandals they\u2019re involved in.<\/p>\n

TP: You\u2019ve worked on both sides of the fence, academia and business. What\u2019s your best advice to young scientists on communicating science to a non-science audience?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PA:<\/strong> I like to network, I like to talk to people. I make it my business to go out and network. I show up to meetings, to workshops, to conferences, I get invited where I can. First of all, I listen. I talk to people and listen to the language that they use. With businesses, I spent a lot of time in the first year of my internship talking to people and asking \u201cwhat are your challenges, why are you talking about biodiversity, what do you want to see change?\u201d. And they would mention all these very specific business terms to me, and I would be furiously writing them down. Then I started to repeat that language back to them. And I find that very effective, because now I go to conferences and throw in some terms that they typically used: risk, dependency, impacts, business case, externalities. I\u2019m still learning new terms as I go, but I\u2019ve found mirroring their language back to them is very effective. I fit my research into their terminology, so our conservation science and ecology then seems less foreign to them.<\/p>\n

SP: So latching onto buzzwords, finding out definitions, learning the language?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PA:<\/strong> Yes, definitely. Read whatever documents they\u2019ve got that are publicly available. Websites, annual reports, that sort of thing. There are often a lot of reports done by NGOs partnering with businesses on sustainability issues. Read the reports that the NGOs produced. It\u2019s a very different world in terms of the language that is used, and you\u2019ve got to get your head around it, so do your homework.<\/p>\n

\"Bridging
Bridging the gap between the corporate world and nature can be hard, but by learning to speak their language, Prue has had success influencing biodiversity policy in businesses (Image Credit: Prue Addison, CC BY 2.0)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

SP: You mentioned you go to workshops and lots of other hands on stuff. How does that clash with the need to publish we so often feel in science?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PA:<\/strong> I\u2019m really lucky, as my fellowship is called a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship, so I\u2019m meant to be focussing on communicating and building relationships with external partners. I get funding to do that, so I can go to a conference somewhere in the world if I think it\u2019s relevant to get the message out about the work that I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n

But for a lot of people, it\u2019s a choice to make. You either do applied work which may take longer to get published or pure research that can be published. I argue that you can publish all the applied work. I work with businesses, NGOs, and with governments. But I always try and make sure that there are capabilities for me to publish the outputs of our collaborations. But I also collaborate a lot with other scientists. I think that\u2019s been my saving grace over the last few years, that other people lead papers, and I contribute as a co-author. So my paper count is still up. Not as a lead author anymore, but there are some now that I\u2019m getting on as last author, which in conservation science is also quite important as it represents a supervisor role.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a massive problem that in academic institutions you are still only encouraged to publish, and there is only career progression based on those metrics, not \u201chow many workshops did you show up at, and how many partnerships have you formed?\u201d. It\u2019s starting to happen in the UK for example, we\u2019ve got the Research Excellence Framework, and they have measurements for achieving research impact. They\u2019re going to have measurements around knowledge exchange, which hopefully will then figure back into career progression metrics, but at the moment they don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m actually leaving academia in a few months time because of that. I will work for an NGO, still as a conservation scientist, still with industry, but on the other side of the academic fence. It\u2019s disappointing, because if I could keep doing the work that I have been doing in a University I would have. But the system just does not work that way<\/a>.<\/p>\n

TP: Are there other obvious differences between the two sides of the fence?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PA:<\/strong> In universities there is this great flexibility. You can choose what you work on. Whereas, my experience has been that that level of flexibility doesn\u2019t exist to the same extent outside of universities. In other places it\u2019s all about achieving your annual goals, there are deadlines, real deadlines outside of academia that you have to actually stick to. Outside in the business world it\u2019s about getting things done. It\u2019s not about sitting and pondering things and waiting for the perfect amount of data before you publish something. The amount of time that we spend working on individual papers to get them to perfection is insane. That\u2019s just not how people work outside in the real world.<\/p>\n

SP: Andrew MacDougall was talking a lot about the economic factor of working outside of academia, the fact that businesses often have an economic bottom line. As a conservation scientist, was there an initial aversion to that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PA:<\/strong> I\u2019m a realist. Economies are what drive pretty much anything at the moment. I\u2019m not one of those environmentalists who believes that we should shut down economic growth for the sake of the environment. But I do believe there\u2019s a way for sustainable growth where environmental considerations are factored in. But it\u2019s about trade-offs. It\u2019s about dealing with multiple competing objectives, between people, the economy, and the environment. And the environment isn\u2019t always going to win. Lots of businesses are moving towards a model of triple bottom line, which is factoring economic, social and environmental objectives into businesses. It sounds like it should all be balanced, but of course it doesn\u2019t always happen.<\/p>\n

To read Prue’s recent piece on urgent changes needed to support policy oriented students, click here<\/a>. To view her recent presentation at the NOF conference, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article is part of an ongoing series of interviews with prominent ecologists, which you can find\u00a0here. With the environmental movement having expanded so quickly over recent decades, it makes sense that many large corporations have started to incorporate sustainability and the environment into their business plans. But what are these business actions actually achieving? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":102,"featured_media":1178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[310,311,71,309],"class_list":["post-1177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays-and-interviews","tag-business","tag-corporate","tag-ecology","tag-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1180,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177\/revisions\/1180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.vm.ntnu.no\/naturviten\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}