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.