Measuring corporate impacts on ecosystem services

The Challenge

Investors are increasingly interested in using data on natural capital impacts to inform their decisions. At the same time, new regulations and voluntary initiatives such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) call for companies to track and report on their impacts. The inclusion of ecosystem services information has so far been limited among existing approaches and data providers, leaving a gap in the information available to guide corporate decisions and financial flows.

Our Solution

To expand access to natural capital analytics, we developed the free, open-source Ecosystem Services Footprinting Tool to enable rapid assessments of an asset, company, or portfolio’s impacts to nature and the benefits nature provides to people. The tool, built on the Natural Capital Project’s InVEST® ecosystem service models, measures impact on four types of ecosystem services using global high-resolution maps of ecosystem services. When coupled with high-resolution satellite imagery, the tool can also provide detailed measurements of asset-level impact and track change over time.

To learn more and download the tool, go to the TNFD tools catalog page.

Funding: Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing