ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the various approaches which may be used by businesses to account for their dependencies and impacts on pollinators and their services. Business accounting systems are diverse as they are designed to satisfy the needs of various stakeholders, which may have different interests and goals regarding a company’s activities and performance. From an environmental perspective, we can distinguish internal and external accounting approaches, namely environmental management accounting which aims to support internal decision-making (e.g. product pricing, cost control, budgeting) and external environmental reporting (i.e. financial, sustainability and/or integrated reporting) which targets external stakeholders for accountability purposes. Similarly, means of crop pollination and pollination of wild plants are very diverse. Crop pollination by insects can be performed either by managed pollinators (e.g. honey bee hives that beekeepers rent to growers) or by wild pollinators resident in natural habitats or untransformed landscapes near these crops (thereby providing an ecosystem service of pollination).1 In turn, the wild flora dependent on insects for the setting of seed (and thus also food for fauna) can be pollinated
1 A.-M. Klein et al., “Importance of Pollinators in Changing Landscapes for World Crops”,
by a few generalist pollinator species for some generalist plants, or this interaction can be specialized and species specific. In the most extreme case, a plant species can only be pollinated by a single pollinator species. In most cases, however, bees are the most important group of animal pollinators. First, we provide a short explanation of the links between bees, their pollination services and business operations, including how various industries are directly and indirectly dependent on the services they provide. Second, we introduce how various business activities impact on bee species, their populations and their services. Then, we discuss accounting for bees from an environmental management accounting perspective before exploring how external reporting approaches may deal with business dependencies and impacts on bees and their services.
