Is environmental protection part of social responsibility?
Is social responsibility part of environmental protection?
A large part of the social responsibility of enterprises stems from environmental problems. The requirements for corporate social responsibility and human understanding of environmental problems are developing in parallel. Today, the concept of social responsibility includes more and more content, and environmental responsibility is no longer simply pollution control. For enterprises, environmental protection and social responsibility are two different and often quite similar tasks.
Regarding the relationship between the two, some people believe that corporate environmental responsibility is an important part of corporate social responsibility, which is an extension of the simple “doing good deeds” of merchants in ancient times. Corporate social responsibility has expanded from labor welfare and charity to environmental protection, which is the inevitable development of contemporary corporate social responsibility. There are also views that if it is understood according to the concept of “responsibility to stakeholders”, then the scope of corporate social responsibility is far smaller than that of corporate environmental responsibility. The former includes both internal and external stakeholders of the enterprise that are directly related to the enterprise; the latter is broader, including not only all stakeholders related to the enterprise, but also stakeholders that are not directly related to the enterprise, such as non-local residents, foreigners, and even other animals and plants and the entire ecosystem, and of course the enterprise itself.
For enterprises, social responsibility is external, and taking on social responsibility means a lot of work in coordination with the outside world. Although environmental issues are also external, a lot of work is done inside the enterprise. Reducing the pollution emissions and ecological impact of enterprises requires the control and improvement of the internal production process of the enterprise, rather than simply planting trees outside the enterprise. There are also many ways to deal with it in actual work. Some enterprises put environmental work within social responsibility work, some enterprises treat it as two parallel tasks, and some enterprises regard other aspects of social responsibility work as part of environmental protection work in order to highlight their image of paying attention to environmental protection.
