Natura Focusing on the Triple Bottom Line
Brazil has a rich natural heritage, one-third of the world’s remaining tropical forests, as is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. Natura’s Ekos Challenge aims to create a model to allow the sustainable use of natural resources, generating good business opportunity and social development for traditional communities and for Natura and its partners.
Enhancing Responsible Social and Environmental Management
Since the 1990s, Natura has been enhancing the responsible social and environmental management of its business, based on the establishment of quality relationships with its stakeholders and of corporate strategies that increasingly place sustainable development at the center of business thinking. Natura has sought to establish processes and systems that ensure the inclusion of its corporate social responsibility principles in its strategic planning and daily business routines. These principles are 1) an ethical and transparent relationship with its stakeholders and 2) the definition of targets that are compatible with sustainable development.
These ethical principles have started to permeate the company’s initiatives in all areas and results include:
- The option for the sustainable use of raw materials from Brazilian biodiversity as a technological platform;
- The adoption of a social and environmental supplier evaluation process;
- The development of packages that have less of an environmental impact.
The Corporate Responsibility Matrix
To focus its attention on the critical issues of this strategy, Natura created a management support tool called the Corporate Responsibility Matrix that helps managers plan and visualize specific actions aimed at each type of stakeholder. It intends to show the investments made in the most critical aspects of this management:
- The monitoring of the quality of Natura’s relationship with its stakeholders regarding ethics, transparency and the efficiency of the dialogue channel, including themes that are not directly related to the business (“fundamentals” line);
- The promotion of sustainable development — whether local, in a specific region, or promoting diversity, education, quality of life and culture (“social and economic” line);
- Protection of the environment (
