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The Odd Decouple: Is Nike’s mission to divorce profits from resource scarcity an unattainable goal or a wise long-term business strategy? , by Kyra Hill

Posted by: | May 6, 2014 Comments Off on The Odd Decouple: Is Nike’s mission to divorce profits from resource scarcity an unattainable goal or a wise long-term business strategy? , by Kyra Hill |

Other commentators remind us that we may be closer than we think. The president of the nation’s first water trust, points out that at least in some contexts, accurate valuation of environmental benefits already occurs, as we can now “precisely calculate how many pounds of nitrogen a wetland filters in a year, or precisely how many kilocalories of cooling benefit a tree canopy provides a watershed.” Knowing and measuring these values allows accounting mechanisms for them, which ultimately means they can be traded and bought. Ideally, methods of quantifying positive social benefit in other contexts could also find their way into everyday business practices and reporting methods. Not only would a business be able to report an environmental profit on conducting an ecosystem restoration project, but it would be able to report additional positive benefits like carbon sequestration or even the positive social impact green space can have on the surrounding human community.

To get back to the question at hand, though, we need to ask whether Nike’s strategy is attainable in the current system. Businesses all over the world recognize that climate change is a significant threat to their survival, but they have little to no incentive to report these concerns, nor any realistic way to quantify efforts to mitigate them. Nike might be able to turn a profit in a way that allows it to simultaneously conserve scarce resources through cost saving and conservation efforts like using less water and fewer materials. But its mission implies a long-term vision that minimizes scarce resource use while simultaneously continuing to increase profits and production. It is a laudable goal, but one that seems unrealistic in our current system that does not adequately value conservation efforts and rewards resource exploitation.  Only if we devise a metric for not only quantifying environmental and social benefit, but reporting these benefits as profit, can Nike, or any other company that seeks to make a profit while minimizing its use of scarce resources, realistically achieve its goal.

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under: Business, General, Natural Resources
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