Ecosystem services and business: making ecosystem services accessible to strategic planners and supply chain decisions

Background/Question/Methods

Corporations affect some of the largest land and resource use decisions on the planet, directly and indirectly, through their operations and material sourcing. The maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem services from natural landscapes hinges on corporate decisions determining the use and management of our lands and waters. Addressing sustainability concerns throughout value chains and corporate strategy has been achieved primarily through methods such as life cycle assessment, environmentally extended input-output models, and more recently environmental profit and loss accounting. These methods are typically coarse in scale and treat all similar habitat types as interchangeable with regard to biodiversity and ecosystem function.  Corporate sustainability reporting is consequently missing potentially important considerations of the spatial dependence and landscape context of different habitats. Heavy data burden has often been cited as a reason to avoid more spatially explicit evaluation of corporate decision-making, but with modern approaches to information management, this need not remain a barrier.  Novel methods are needed to better integrate ecological principles into corporate supply chain decisions and strategic planning with minimal constraints, through generalized modeling and application of globally available data. 

Results/Conclusions

We demonstrate how these decisions may change with the inclusion of such information, and propose a new venture to lift the barrier of data aquisition and facilitate the adoption of such methods by corporations, as well as governments, development banks, and other large-scale actors determining the fate of ecosystems and the benefits they provide.