Biodiversity Conservation

Our society benefits from a multitude of nature’s blessings grounded upon biodiversity, known as ecosystem services. Sadly, however, over the last 50 years this biodiversity has been lost at an unprecedented pace, and corporations are required to take initiatives on biodiversity conservation and sustainable resource usage.

We adequately understand the impacts on biodiversity, and collaborate with our stakeholders, from local partners and environmental NGOs to other professionals and issues experts, to achieve our goal of contributing to biodiversity conservation.

To promote biodiversity initiatives in our business activities, we established the Biodiversity Project to implement concrete measures in three important areas that affect biodiversity: land use, products, and procurement.

We aim to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity in the areas where our business sites are located. As a first step to achieve our land use goals, we developed tools to quantitatively evaluate our potential impact per site.

As a result of assessing Panasonic’s 121 sites in Japan using this tool, we selected the Moriguchi and Kadoma areas in Osaka, where 12 sites including the head office are located, as model areas. We will enhance the ecological network that connects the Yodo first-class river running in the north of the areas and Tsurumi Ryokuchi Park located to the south of the areas. Specifically we will contribute to creating urban areas that are blessed with nature and provide habitats for living creatures. Because we need to collaborate with a range of stakeholders to achieve this, we established a council to examine measures for biodiversity in cooperation with the local government, universities, and companies in October 2010.

We receive third-party assessments from BirdLife Asia, an independent, global NGO that provides useful product information to help customers distinguish products that contribute positively to biodiversity conservation. Some examples of these products are our bamboo-fiber speakers, which are made from sustainable and recyclable bamboo and provide high-quality sound; our Mushi-veil light, which provides low insect-attracting features so as not to disrupt the ecosystem of insects; and our Tafna-ray lighting system, which prevents powdery mildew of strawberry from forming and reduces the amount of chemical pesticide use.

Panasonic created the Panasonic Group Green Procurement Guidelines for Wood to conserve biodiversity and sustainable resource usage after thorough consultations with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Japan. The Guidelines divides various wood and wooden materials that may be procured into three categories: Priority procurement (Category 1), Acceptable procurement (Category 2), and Avoiding procurement (Category 3). In fiscal 2011, we used approximately 390,000 m3 of wood and wooden materials. Of this, 71% (a 21-point year-on-year increase) was from Category 1, 28% from Category 2 (a 19-point year-on-year decrease), and 1% (a 2-point year-on-year decrease) from Category 3. We continue to aim toward reducing our Category 3 procurement to nearly zero by fiscal 2013.

Since 2007, we have been promoting the Yellow Sea Ecoregion Support Project, a seven-year partnership with WWF Japan. The project aims to implement measures required for the sustainable use and conservation of the Yellow Sea Ecoregion, a body of sea water enclosed by China and the Korean peninsula and noted for its high biodiversity value.