Companies' strategies to decrease environmental impacts: The implementation of environmental impact assessments in French law
Résumé
The impact of companies on biodiversity can have irreversible consequences. Biodiversity is drastically decreasing, and alarming observations related to climate change have been made. It is important to be aware that the human activity has played a major role in creating this situation. In order to help companies to limit their impact on biodiversity, the law has developed tools such as environmental impact assessments. They aim to make firms responsible for their own actions by improving their knowledge of their environmental impacts and to avoid damage by anticipating it as far upstream as possible. It is up to companies to manage the use of the tools available to them. They can decide to use them efficiently for the protection of the environment, or not. Generally, companies prefer to balance their environmental, social and economic interests by negotiating acceptance of their project with the various stakeholders involved. This is called the ecological negotiation. The aim of this paper is to stress the power companies have to protect the environment and to highlight the approaches that are emerging from the use of environmental impact assessments by firms (public as well as private), which include the use of compensation methods. The study was carried out in collaboration with an ecological engineering consulting firm and is mostly based on expert's statements.