Roche: Natural capital protocol application to Swiss operational sites
Roche applied the Natural Capital Protocol primarily to inform stakeholders about the impacts and dependencies of our direct operations.
We wanted to understand what our impacts and dependencies equate to when monetized and to be able to communicate important updates about our work to stakeholders.
We recognize that our business impacts society positively and negatively and this is why we performed a full natural capital monetization exercise from both business and societal value perspectives.
We did not specifically apply the Protocol to inform commercial decision making. Instead, we were interested to understand how the Protocol aligned with, confirmed to and could potentially improve our existing procedures.
- Yes
- Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services
- Climate & Air Emissions
- Energy
- Materials & Resources
- Noise & Light Disturbances
- Waste Management
- Water
- Corporate
- Monetary
- Quantitative
- Value to business
- Value to society
- Switzerland
- Law & order
- Direct operations
- Healthcare
Key findings
Our assessment found that the business benefits outweigh the business costs associated with natural capital dependencies and resource inputs.
The GHG emissions societal cost represented around 5% of the Swiss operations’ net income, and the full negative societal costs (excluding societal benefits) represented around 6.2% of net income. This is based on a company average profit of 18.7% and Swiss operational turnover of CHF 497 million for 2015.
This suggested that our activities’ cost to society was relatively low compared to the turnover of our operations.
We continue to gain further insight into our negative impacts. GHG emissions create our largest impact (80%). We also measure water consumption and chemical discharges to waterways. We can conclude that our sites in Switzerland are well managed from a natural capital perspective, with no immediate concerns.
The Protocol complemented our sustainability initiatives very well, including methodologies such as carbon disclosure and risk assessment. We recognized that external assistance was helpful to translate outputs into monetary values.
More information
http://naturalcapitalcoalition.org/roche-natural-capital-protocol-pilot-summary-report/
NCA Pilot Study Report: http://www.roche.com/dam/jcr:d4db8e9d-5d6d-40af-9719-a1003acdd442/en/not-natural-capital-pilot-study.pdf
Christopher Earl (christopher.earl@roche.com) Safety, Security, Health and Environmental Data Manager