Services

Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services Solutions

What are biodiversity and ecosystem services ?

 

• Biodiversity may be defined as the diversity of living systems at three interacting levels: genetic diversity, species diversity and ecosystem diversity.

 

• Ecosystem services refer to all the benefits humans obtain from functioning ecosystems, such as food, wood, fossil fuels, purified water or climate regulation.

 

• As various biodiversity components underpin different ecosystem services, biodiversity and ecosystem services are intrinsically interconnected.

 

Why are they relevant to business?

BES degradation is highly relevant to business because companies not only impact ecosystems and the services they provide but also depend on them. Ecosystem degradation, therefore, can pose a number of risks to corporate performance as well as create new business opportunities.

With the UN 2010 International Year of Biodiversity and the recent release of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity business reports, business-induced biodiversity loss has become the second biggest sustainability challenge for business after climate change.

With internationally-recognised expertise on biodiversity and ecosystem services, ISS provides incisive tools for addressing BES risks and opportunities and delivering win-win solutions at all relevant decision-making levels.

 

• Strategic risk and opportunity assessments
  Building upon several widely-tested tools such as the Ecosystem Services Review and the Business & Biodiversity Interdependency Indicator, ISS has developed its own process-based quantitative framework to help firms assess their risks and opportunities as regards to their BES dependencies and impacts. This is the first step towards developing BES policies, strategies and action plans that are practical and meaningful to stakeholders.

 

• Biodiversity Footprint
  This ISS-exclusive cutting-edge accounting tool helps companies quantify and manage their BES dependencies and impacts. The Biodiversity Footprint methodology may operate at three different levels of analysis: production site, product or project life-cycle and company-wide analysis. With direct links to management accounting principles and information systems, its outputs can help firms produce key BES performance indicators, decrease or avoid BES costs as well as identify new income and investment opportunities such as payments for ecosystem services.

 

• No-net-loss biodiversity offset design and management
  A no-net-loss policy is gaining ground worldwide for corporate biodiversity impacts, notably under the leadership of the Business and Biodiversity Offset Program (BBOP). ISS provides no-net-loss BES offset design and management services under two distinct contexts: mandatory offsets for projects requiring environmental impact assessments and voluntary BES offsets for unregulated impacts such as those of supply chains, clients or subsidiaries.