New business decision-making aids in an era of complexity, scrutiny, and uncertainty: Tools for identifying, assessing, and valuing ecosystem services

Abstract

Imagine a corporate manager under pressure to continually add metrics to track and analyze business impacts and performance. The number of parameters, complexity of processes, and cost to the company would constantly rise. Global companies face this dynamic. In response, business leaders seek integrated approaches to track a multitude of metrics concurrently within the broader system of performance. As part of continual corporate improvement processes, a range of companies in the early twenty-first century began to consider whether the concept of ecosystem services might be a useful lens through which to view environmental and social performance of their businesses. This exploratory work was driven by a growing number of players who noted that current corporate environmental performance tracking methods were inadequate for assessing many issues related to maintenance of natural capital, as well as ecological structure and function, and the flow of nature’s benefits.