'Retooling' the Approach to Measuring Corporate Impact on Ecosystems
December 17, 2008 - With an increasing number of corporations recognizing the importance of the environment to their bottom line, Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) has published a groundbreaking report reviewing the emerging tools companies can use to measure "ecosystem services"-the collective benefits, such as the provision of clean water and timber, that are provided by a community of plants and animals interacting with their physical environments.
"Companies from all industries rely on ecosystems services-from forests, which supply pure water and help regulate temperature, to wetlands, which provide filtration and flood mitigation benefits," said Linda Hwang, BSR's Manager, and Environmental Research & Development. "And while there are many tools to help corporations measure and protect these services, until BSR launched this report, there hasn't been a concise and accessible review that helps companies select the best tool for their needs."
BSR's report, "Measuring Corporate Impact on Ecosystems: A Comprehensive Review of New Tools," developed with support from the nine global companies in BSR's Environmental Services, Tools, and Markets Working Group, offers a comprehensive assessment of the seven leading tools.
These tools build on the scientific foundation of the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and fall into two broad categories:
Multi-ecosystem service assessment tools: These focus on more than one ecosystem service at once. One example is ARIES (Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Service), a computer model that forecasts the economic values provided by ecosystem services in a specific area.
Biodiversity-focused tools: These tools consider the role of biodiversity in ecosystem structure and function. An example is BBOP (Business and Biodiversity Offsets Program Toolkit), which assesses the effectiveness of biodiversity offsets-conservation activities intended to compensate for the residual, unavoidable harm to biodiversity caused by infrastructure projects.
The report also includes a chart that compares the relative strengths and weaknesses of the seven tools from a corporate perspective.
"Given the growing efforts around environmental markets and policy changes to protect environmental services, companies need to understand their dependencies and impacts on ecosystem services," Hwang said. "This report gives leading companies a starting point for integrating ecosystem services into their corporate decisions-in effect benefiting their bottom line and ecological systems."
