Authors: Lisa Mandle1, Andrew Shea2,3, Emily Soth1, Jesse A. Goldstein1, Stacie Wolny1, Jeffrey R. Smith4,5, Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer6,7, Richard P. Sharp6,8, Mayur Patel1
Affiliations
  1. Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA
  2. Global Sustainable Finance, Morgan Stanley, New York, NY 10036
  3. Current affiliation: Frontier & Stripe Climate, Stripe, South San Francisco, CA 94080
  4. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton New Jersey 08544
  5. High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544
  6. Global Science, WWF. 131 Steuart St., San Francisco, CA 94105
  7. Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota, 1954 Buford Ave., St. Paul, MN 55108
  8. SPRING, 5455 Shafter Ave., Oakland CA 94618
Abstract:
Aligning economic activities with the global sustainable development agenda requires understanding companies’ impacts on nature. Here, we present a new approach for quantifying the direct impacts of companies’ physical assets on nature based on global maps for eight ecosystem services and biodiversity metrics. We apply this approach to a set of over 2,000 global, publicly traded companies with 580,000 mapped physical assets. We find that companies in utility, real estate, materials, and financial sectors have the largest impacts on average, but there is substantial variation among companies within all sectors. In addition, we use high-resolution satellite imagery to assess the impact of active lithium mines based on their footprints. We show that the impact varies substantially among mines and can also be tracked across time for a mine. This approach enables differentiation among companies and assets based on their impacts to nature relative to their revenue or production.