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.