Where, What, and How Much

Where, what and how much?

Measuring actual environmental outcomes from corporate activity, such as changes in biodiversity over time, would require data collection on-site in many different places along increasingly complex value chains. Currently, this is unfeasible due to limited resources, underdeveloped assessment tools, and a lack of consensus on which aspects of biodiversity or environmental change to prioritize. As a result, corporate impact is typically estimated based on the known environmental pressures that corporate activities have on local environments - here referred to as environmental impacts.

As noted in Chapter 4, the impact of a carbon atom on our climate is the same regardless of where it is released in the atmosphere. However, to meaningfully estimating impacts from practically all other human-induced environmental pressures – such as water and land use, pollution, invasive species, resource use and removal – requires detailed information that can be summarized simply as where, what and how much.

Where represents location (as discussed in Chapter 3). Shifting to asset-level data collection and reporting will have to become the norm if companies and investors are serious about monitoring progress toward environmental targets. Some jurisdictions with strong environmental regulations require that companies disclose this data already, and firms in some, particularly extractive, sectors have already begun the journey of detailed asset level reporting of multiple environmental impacts. But globally this is far from the norm.

What represents an identification of the environmental pressure caused by a particular economic activity, for example water extraction, pollutants emitted, etc.

How much requires quantifying the absolute amount of a particular environmental impact associated with operations at a specific location. Examples include cubic meters of water used, land area covered, and volumes of fertilizers or chemicals used. In cases where direct quantification is not feasible, information on management practices, introduced species, and disease outbreaks can still provide valuable information for impact estimation.

Armed with information on where, what and how much, there is suddenly a variety of scientifically grounded analytical methods and tools available to estimate various types of environmental impact. These range from geospatial models to lifecycle analysis (LCA) and footprinting tools. When deployed with company-wide revenue or sales data as the primary input, these tools can generally not provide meaningful information about nature impact in specific sites of operations (unless characterization factors for that specific site or habitat type are used). However, location-specific information on environmental pressures opens opportunities for a range of relatively sophisticated impact assessments, including radically improved footprinting analysis. Therefore, in the next two chapters, we introduce a scientifically grounded way to prioritize the most essential environmental impacts to disclose (capturing the where, what and how much) called Essential Environmental Impact Variables (EEIVs), as well as a novel tool that is uniquely capable of estimating global effects from local impacts: the Earth System Impact (ESI) score. Both grounded in the science of the nine planetary boundaries.