Estimating detailed asset-level impacts
To quantify and compare impacts at the asset level within an asset’s facility category, we identified active lithium mines with associated production data from the S&P Metals and Mining Dataset30. This resulted in a set of 23 mines. High resolution satellite imagery allowed us to map mine footprints and their change over time annually from 2016-2023. We calculated mine-level impacts for each year by summing the values of the previously described global impact maps under the footprint.
Acknowledgements: We thank Harun Dogo for his pivotal role in launching this collaboration, and Allison Bailey and Neil Nathan for their feedback and contributions to identifying data sources. The Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing provided valuable input and framing. This work was funded by the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing. LM was also supported by a grant from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation ”Advancing the Research Frontier of Biosphere Stewardship, Strategic Research Collaboration and Postdoc Program between The Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, and The Natural Capital Project, Stanford University.”
Data and code availability: We provide the global ecosystem service layers under a CC BY 4.0 license at https://github.com/natcap/natural-capital-footprint-impact, along with code for quantifying impacts by asset type and company with user-provided asset and company data. All other databases and datasets used in this study derive from sources cited in the Methods section; associated licenses prevent us from redistributing the derived datasets.