Quantifying company-level impacts
A company’s impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity will depend on its number of assets, the footprint size (area) of those assets, and their location relative to ecosystem service and biodiversity values on the landscape. Existing data on corporate assets may include an asset’s location in terms of latitude and longitude, but often does not include information on the asset’s footprint on the landscape. To estimate impacts across thousands of companies with hundreds of thousands of assets varying greatly in size, we estimated a median footprint size for each asset facility category in the S&P Physical Assets Database via random selection, visual detection, and measurement using GIS. The sampled assets’ measurements were used to calculate median footprint sizes (areas or widths) for each category. These median values were then applied to each asset based on its category to create asset footprints. (See the Supplemental Information for more details.)
Focusing on a suite of assets that generally result in paved or bare ground and little vegetation (e.g., buildings, energy infrastructure, mines), we assumed that development of a corporate asset results in the complete loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity values estimated to exist under baseline conditions. To calculate the impact of each asset for each of the 8 ecosystem service and biodiversity metrics, we used zonal statistics50 to calculate the total value under the asset footprint for each of the previously described global impact maps. We then summed asset-level impacts by company.
We applied this approach to the more than 2,000 companies within the MSCI ACWI index, using the S&P Physical Asset database22 for information on each company’s asset locations and category. We grouped companies by their GICS (Global Industry Classification Standard)51 sector and industry to understand the differences among, and variation within, sectors and industries.