Authors: Lisa Mandle1, Andrew Shea2,3, Emily Soth1, Jesse A. Goldstein1, Stacie Wolny1, Jeffrey R. Smith4,5, Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer6,7, Richard P. Sharp6,8, Mayur Patel1AffiliationsNatural Capital Project, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USAGlobal Sustainable Finance, Morgan Stanley, New York, NY 10036Current affiliation: Frontier & Stripe Climate, Stripe, South San Francisco, CA 94080Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton New Jersey 08544High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544Global Science, WWF. 131 Steuart St., San Francisco, CA 94105Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota, 1954 Buford Ave., St. Paul, MN 55108SPRING, 5455 Shafter Ave., Oakland CA 94618Abstract: Aligning economic activities with the global sustainable development agenda requires understanding companies’ impacts on nature. Here, we present a new approach for quantifying the direct impacts of companies’ physical assets on nature based on global maps for eight ecosystem services and biodiversity metrics. We apply this approach to a set of over 2,000 global, publicly traded companies with 580,000 mapped physical assets. We find that companies in utility, real estate, materials, and financial sectors have the largest impacts on average, but there is substantial variation among companies within all sectors. In addition, we use high-resolution satellite imagery to assess the impact of active lithium mines based on their footprints. We show that the impact varies substantially among mines and can also be tracked across time for a mine. This approach enables differentiation among companies and assets based on their impacts to nature relative to their revenue or production.

Many valuable economic benefits from nature have traditionally been overlooked in both national accounts and government policy. To remedy this, countries are adopting the new United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting framework for valuing ecosystem services, but inclusion of key hydrological services has so far been limited. Here, we develop novel ecosystem service flow accounts linked to a natural capital assessment in Colombia's Sinú Basin to value ecosystems' contributions to water and energy security. Using integrated biophysical and economic models parameterized with local data, we find ecosystems deliver sediment retention benefits to the energy and water sectors equivalent to 1.7% of the region's GDP. A planned expansion of the region's aqueduct system would further increase these values by 12%. Our findings are informing national and regional development planning and policy within Colombia and provide lessons for the many other countries adopting natural capital accounting to support their sustainable development goals.