Abstract
Ecosystem services approaches are material to business performance. However, the lack of sufficiently detailed and commonly used ecosystem services classification systems prevents companies from benefitting fully from them. The final ecosystem services perspective, embodied by the Final Ecosystem Goods and Services Classification System (FEGS-CS) and the National Ecosystem Services Classification System (NESCS), offers a way through key bottlenecks to mainstreaming ecosystem services in corporate decision-making and accounting. Compared to other systems, these are easier to use, improve materiality analysis, and aid stakeholder engagement. In addition, their potential to improve the accuracy of valuation makes them preferable for natural capital accounting. Companies that adopt this final ecosystem services (FES) perspective are likely to gain these immediate benefits and first-mover advantage, as this FES perspective is poised to become standard practice.
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Notes
- 1.
The views expressed in this chapter are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The author team thanks Dr. Dixon Landers, Michael Trombley, anonymous chapter reviewers, and Dr. Ki-Hoon Lee for helpful comments.
- 2.
- 3.
The Corporate Ecosystem Services Review, Hanson et al. (2008); The Guide to Corporate Ecosystem Valuation, WBCSD 2010; the IFC Performance Standards, IFC 2012; IPIECA’s Ecosystem Services Guidance: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Guide, IPIECA 2011; and the IUCN French Committee’s Corporate Biodiversity Reporting and Indicators, IUCN French Committee 2014.
- 4.
“NESCS” is often vocalized as “nexus” for ease of pronunciation, and to emphasize the tool’s intended function of linking ecologic and economic systems.
- 5.
Practitioners have experimented with creating numeric codes for CICES rows, again to date without a user/beneficiary component. CICES, FEGS-CS, and NESCS all claim to incorporate the essential elements from Box 7.2, and all of the appealing elements (although there is debate among ES classification developers about whether competing systems hold this or that property). It is worth noting that these are the only “formal” (F)ES classifications the authors have discovered, in the sense that other commonly used ES typologies (MA and TEEB) do not claim to incorporate the elements of formal classification listed in Box 7.2, and lack developed (nested) hierarchies that are characteristic of formal classifications. Ad hoc typing of a few ES is a common practice in academic work, but does not attempt to rise to formal classification.
- 6.
In this chapter, ecological endpoints substitutes for Ecological End-Products as named in the NESCS report, because accountants understand something more specific by “end-product” than do ecologists and some economists.
- 7.
It is not as clear that the MA and TEEB typologies share the properties of exhaustiveness or uniqueness in an adequately rigorous sense within the FES perspective.
- 8.
Developers of both FEGS-CS and NESCS note for those cleaving to the MA four types of ES, that post-classification assignment of one of the four types to any of the objects defined as FES is simply done. Anyone wishing to call a 11.0103 (water from a river to feed grazing livestock) from FEGS-CS, or a 11.12.1105.1112 (water from a river to animal cultivation by an animal production subsector) from NESCS, a “provisioning service”, can easily do so without violating any of the organizing principles of either system.
- 9.
The Natural Capital Protocol lists “abiotic services” including mineral ores and fossil fuels as “ES”, whereas the CICES, FEGS-CS, and NESCS do not, because these are not renewable by an ecosystem roughly within a human lifetime.
- 10.
Wittmer et al. note that “stakeholders often identify a much more differentiated set of services than any of the classifications listed above” (p. 52). This may indicate some appeal to practitioners in the quest for a standard from the more articulated FEGS-CS and NESCS systems, which were not published at that time (the exhaustive element from Box 7.2).
- 11.
The full spread of 6-digit FEGS combinations appear in a 50-page set of matrices, accessible online with the FEGS-CS report.
- 12.
The tool launched at the GreenBiz conference in February 2016, and is now available for download by companies and individuals in the Apple App Store.
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Rhodes, C., Finisdore, J., Dvarskas, A., Houdet, J., Corona, J., Maynard, S. (2018). Final Ecosystem Services for Corporate Metrics and Performance. In: Lee, KH., Schaltegger, S. (eds) Accounting for Sustainability: Asia Pacific Perspectives. Eco-Efficiency in Industry and Science, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70899-7_7
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