Balancing business and biodiversity: a step in the right direction?

“So much of the value provided to us by nature is taken for gran­ted,” explains Lisa Mandle, lead sci­ent­ist for the Nat­ur­al Cap­it­al Pro­ject at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. “Our mis­sion is to provide inform­a­tion on where and how nature mat­ters to people – and the economy.” 

The Nat­ur­al Cap­it­al Pro­ject is an inter­dis­cip­lin­ary organ­isa­tion that has been work­ing on the ques­tion of eco­sys­tem ser­vices – or ‘nature’s con­tri­bu­tions to people’ – for 15 years. Using InVEST, a soft­ware they have developed, the team say that they use the best avail­able sci­ence to help decision-mak­ing. “And the busi­ness side is a piece of that,” she explains.

InVEST is an open-source soft­ware suite; a tool for explor­ing dif­fer­ent scen­ari­os of land and ocean use and man­age­ment. “We wanted to make a tool that was easy to use in a vari­ety of con­texts,” Lisa Mandle states. InVEST provides a suite of mod­els to com­pare eco­sys­tem ser­vices in dif­fer­ent instances. It enables users to map and quanti­fy ser­vices such as car­bon sequest­ra­tion, flood pro­tec­tion and water qual­ity, based on com­monly avail­able data like topo­graph­ic maps.

Glob­al impacts on ecosystems

“To date, we have found over 400 peer-reviewed (and oth­er) pub­lic­a­tions using InVEST. Of them, 82% are authored by people who are not part of the Nat­ur­al Cap­it­al Pro­ject, which is a good sign that our soft­ware is being widely used.” Accord­ing to the Nat­ur­al Cap­it­al Pro­ject, InVEST can be applied any­where in the world, and can be espe­cially valu­able in con­texts with low access to data. And, as such, the team recently ran mod­els on a glob­al scale for the first time. Their res­ults, pub­lished in the journ­al Sci­ence¹, indic­ate regions of the world where invest­ment in nat­ur­al resources would have the biggest impact on loc­al com­munit­ies, includ­ing the Ganges Basin, East­ern China and regions of sub-Saha­ran Africa. 

“Our approach and tools are a way of show­ing what’s at stake by bring­ing the value of nature into decision-mak­ing and increas­ing trans­par­ency of the con­sequences of choices made by gov­ern­ments and busi­nesses on people.” 

Work­ing with big companies

“In addi­tion to gov­ern­ments, NGOs, and research insti­tu­tions, we have worked with a num­ber of dif­fer­ent com­pan­ies in the private sec­tor,” she explains. One of those is the multi-nation­al, Uni­lever, which has made some very ambi­tious com­mit­ments to redu­cing the impacts of their oper­a­tions on the envir­on­ment. They are look­ing at the impacts of sourcing products from dif­fer­ent places².

There are many ways busi­nesses can make use of the Nat­ur­al Cap­it­al Project’s sci­ence and tools. “Some com­pan­ies like Uni­lever have people who have been run­ning our mod­els by them­selves,” she out­lines. In oth­er cases, inform­a­tion is taken up by the busi­ness via con­sult­ants and research­ers. “Even though we didn’t work dir­ectly with them, insur­ance com­pany Swiss Re recently pub­lished a report³ based on our mod­el­ling, too.”

In 2015, the Nat­ur­al Cap­it­al Pro­ject pub­lished a study describ­ing a col­lab­or­a­tion with Dow chem­ic­al⁴. The ana­lys­is was a case study using one of their facil­it­ies in the Gulf of Texas, which is sus­cept­ible to flood­ing from coastal storms. They wanted to know wheth­er they should invest in a sea wall to pro­tect it. In this instance, they were faced with the options of (1) build­ing an arti­fi­cial sea wall or (2) restor­ing marsh­lands as a nat­ur­al pro­tec­tion barrier. 

Based on the ana­lyses, it was found that an arti­fi­cial sea wall would provide a value of $217 mil­lion to the com­pany, sig­ni­fic­antly high­er than nat­ur­al pro­tec­tions. How­ever, upon using InVEST to mod­el dif­fer­ent scen­ari­os, the bal­ance shif­ted. They pro­posed anoth­er solu­tion: a mod­er­ate sea wall com­bined with some res­tor­a­tion efforts. In that con­fig­ur­a­tion they saw added cost­al pro­tec­tion from nat­ur­al sys­tems, bene­fits to loc­als in terms of recre­ation­al activ­it­ies and car­bon sequest­ra­tion – all of which are con­sidered as eco­sys­tem ser­vices – provid­ing a ‘hybrid’ out­come that was worth $229 mil­lion to the company. 

Moreover, there were added advant­ages for biod­iversity, sup­port­ing fish­er­ies and wild­life. Thus, provid­ing an argu­ment for a par­tial res­tor­a­tion of the land, offer­ing a ‘grey-green’ approach as a com­prom­ise that was both eco­nom­ic­ally and envir­on­ment­ally favourable. 

Con­trib­ut­ing to wider projects

In some cases, the Nat­ur­al Cap­it­al Pro­ject is involved in more com­plex, multi-industry col­lab­or­a­tions. One of their pro­jects in Mon­go­lia, led by Nat­ur­al Cap­it­al Pro­ject lead sci­ent­ist Becky Chap­lin-Kramer, involves the pro­duc­tion of cashmere for lux­ury fash­ion house, Ker­ing⁵.

Dur­ing a peri­od of less than 10 years, the demand for cashmere had quad­rupled, res­ult­ing in a drastic increase in goat farm­ing in the Gobi Desert. Over-graz­ing drove a huge drop in veget­a­tion, with neg­at­ive impacts on the envir­on­ment includ­ing dust from the desert being easi­er to whip into clouds that reached as far away as California.

The team were involved in find­ing a solu­tion. To do so, they helped a loc­al mine by offer­ing them a solu­tion for biod­iversity off­set­ting in the region to restore the veget­a­tion. For that, the Nat­ur­al Cap­it­al Pro­ject have been using their eco­sys­tem mod­el­ling ser­vices in the form of InVEST, com­bined with NASA satel­lite imagery to mon­it­or the res­tor­a­tion project. 

As such, the team are see­ing ways to inter­act with busi­nesses to make plans, help decision-mak­ing and mon­it­or the out­comes. Nev­er­the­less, work­ing with indus­tries in this way requires sub­stan­tial research efforts and time. “We get more requests than we can handle,” says Lisa Mandle. “There is a lot of demand for this kind of inform­a­tion and the chal­lenge has been provid­ing solu­tions quickly and com­pre­hens­ively enough for the people who want to use it. It’s great to see these ideas really tak­ing hold around the world.”