Many commentators and experts are hailing ‘net positive’ as the next big thing in sustainability. What’s not to like?

What’s better than nothing? Something, obviously. Or so goes the logic behind the “net positive” concept.

If the first step down the road to sustainability is for businesses to learn to grow without increasing their impact – decouplers – and the second step is for businesses to leave no damage at all behind them – zeronauts – what’s the third?

Well, the third, and best, step is for businesses not just to do no harm, but to actively do good; businesses with an overall positive social and environmental impact; businesses leaving the planet and society in a better state than they found it. Net positive businesses.

The idea has been hailed as the next big thing in sustainability since Kingfisher bravely launched its Net Positive strategy in 2012. In fact, others have been proposing the same notion in slightly more limited terms for some time previously.

But Kingfisher’s announcement caught the imagination, leading to a wave of publicity and plenty of other companies quietly looking to see if they could commit to saying something similar. Are we about to see a wave of companies following suit? Let’s hope not.

There is a lot of groundwork to be done before this concept – undoubtedly exciting and motivating though it is – can really drive change. In the current form, net positive is little more than a marketing slogan, and unless some serious work is done on definition and measurement, there is a very real risk it may advance the cause of sustainability little and in fact do huge damage. There are three big problems to be solved:

Do we include economics?

Businesses exist to meet a need in society; they provide goods or services that customers want and are prepared to pay for. In meeting that need they may – and usually do – have negative impacts on natural resources, ecosystems and potentially other human aspects of society such as public health, social cohesion or the built environment.

We accept the negatives to allow us access to the positives. If we are to take a genuinely holistic view of the impact of a company we must weigh these all in the scales. We have to consider the social benefit of being able to talk to Mum from the bus with the environmental damage from mineral mining and the energy used in the mobile phone network.

If we do, most businesses could frame a good argument that they are already net positive, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. Even if we are sceptical of this, including the core economics makes the net positive test very easy to pass. If we don’t we’re asking companies to justify their existence with one hand metaphorically tied behind their backs.

And this leads us neatly to the second big problem.

How do we trade off?

It is a very difficult thing to weigh one impact against another. Even the most advanced net positive business will be left with some negative impacts, either on the environment or on society.

So its net positive position will rely on an argument that the positive impact will outweigh the negative, but this is problematic given that the impacts will almost certainly be different in type. We see the problem already, in, for example, wind turbines which save CO₂ but obscure the horizon. Our perception of which matters most depends – in this case quite literally – on our point of view. The weighting of one impact against another is always subjective and potentially incendiary as the different needs of stakeholders clash.

Interestingly Kingfisher has got neatly around this problem by defining four big impact areas and aiming to have a positive impact in each; entirely sensible and laudable, but not net positive in the true sense of the words.

Does it provide an easy way out on the knotty problems?

Given this difficulty, the suspicion must arise that net positive rhetoric becomes a type of offset. The true scale of the problem of sustainability is becoming clearer as companies work hard and invest millions to cut their impacts by only a few percent. If they can do something positive elsewhere and claim it against their stubborn remainder the temptation to do so will be enormous.

Viewed positively, this could unleash a flood of corporate resources and creativity into new solutions. But the danger comes when it’s more tempting to plant trees than tackle the spiralling corporate energy use.

In that respect one can’t help but recall the enthusiasm that greeted the idea of carbon neutrality a few years ago, as companies queued up to proudly proclaim that status. As awareness dawned that the only real way to get there was through offset – and the low price of carbon credits didn’t help – the credibility of the idea gradually leached away.

Some conscientious corporate citizens held fast (and still do) to the idea that they should drive their own emissions as low as they can before then offsetting the remainder, but the temptation to buy a quick way out of the problem was too great for many. The consequence was a good idea largely discredited.

So what about the idea of net positive? Using the immense power of business to solve sustainability problems rather than create them is fundamental. Impossible goals generate enthusiasm and unleash creativity. But without rigorous answers to the three questions above the words “net positive” are so nebulous that they will quickly become the fashion and equally quickly debased. Frankly, it’s too good an idea to waste by going off half-cocked.

‘Positive’ without the ‘net’?

• Interface, the carpet tiles giant,has apublic goal to “become restorative through the power of influence” (quoting its late chief executive Ray Anderson). However, its general sustainability strategy is focused on “zero impact” goals rather than net positive ones.
• Rio Tinto has committed to net positive impact on biodiversity, as adopted in 2004. Essentially it funds conservation activities to offset the damage caused by the company’s mining activities.
• GE (Ecomagination). While there are other carbon intensive wings of the GE conglomerate, Ecomagination has generated some important green technology, which GE portrays as an offsetting effect towards a net positive position.
• Ikea will become “forest positive” by 2020, meaning that it intends its business to have an overall positive effect on the world’s forests – growing at least as many trees as it uses to make products by 2020.
• Coca-Cola says: “Our goal is to safely return to communities and nature an amount of water equivalent to what we use in all of our beverages and their production.”

Kingfisher – a pioneer, but net positive?

Kingfisher has set the long-term goal to “transform the way we operate to become net positive by 2050”. The initial focus is on four pillars, aligned with four of the company’s biggest impacts: