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In This Issue
Editor's Note
Measuring the Measurement Tools for Corporate Performance
How much is it worth to your company to use ecosystem services, those natural systems that businesses rely on for raw materials, adequate supplies of clean water, and protection from natural disasters? And when nature provides those services ostensibly for free, how do you place a value on them?
With companies like Puma, Dow Chemical, and Disney launching initiatives to measure their impact on ecosystem services, a class of tools has emerged to help. But based on our recent research that applied each tool in a hypothetical business setting, it’s not easy to compare them.
BSR Research Manager Linda Hwang, who leads our Ecosystem Services, Tools & Markets working group, explores opportunities to refine the approach of the tools to make them more useful to companies looking for an effective “off-the-shelf” application that can also fit into existing corporate protocols. Stay tuned in a few weeks for the complete report.
This week, we also focus on our impacts on two parts of ecosystem services—carbon and energy, and water.
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In Depth
Measuring Corporate Performance in an Era of Complexity, Scrutiny, and Uncertainty
By Linda Hwang, Manager, Research, Sissel Waage, Senior Advisor, and Kit Armstrong, Senior Advisor, BSR
As more companies attempt to measure their impact on ecosystems, how do the tools to help them do this measure up?
Read more →
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Quick Hit
Water as an Unequal Human Right
A recent posting on Visualizing.org—a creative community that provides graphical representations of data on complex issues—looks at the differences in how "consuming" countries and developing countries use water and are affected by the lack of clean water. The visual representation—created by Tuduyen Nguyen and Cameron Reynolds-Flatt—was created to encourage people to conserve water resources by pointing out facts such as the number of bottles of water consumed each year in the United States and the percentage of the world’s population that lives without basic sanitation.
Sources
EPA.gov, River.org, BluePlanetNetwork.org, Data360.org, TheWaterProject.org, CharityWater.org, nationalgeographic.com, Slideshare.net/nyctwestival/20-water-fact, Flowthefilm.com
Click here to see the full graphic.
On the Record
Shell Calls for Price on Carbon Emissions to Encourage Alternative Energy Options
By
During Shell’s recent public "webchat" on the company’s energy scenarios, several company representatives discussed developments in the world’s energy systems. The panel addressed questions ranging from the price of carbon to energy security and climate science.
One participant asked about the use of coal and Shell’s capacity to influence the decarbonization of the world’s energy system, citing recent growth in coal exports. Shell’s Vice President, Global Business Environment, Jeremy Bentham responded that despite having exited the coal business, Shell remains committed to licensing coal-related technologies:
“We anticipate that coal use will continue to surge, and that technologies like gasification and carbon capture and storage are going to be very important. We'd really like to see a meaningful price applied to CO2 that will shape the development of the power industry and moderate coal growth in favor of lower-carbon options including natural gas.”
—Jeremy Bentham, vice president, global business environment, Shell (May 4, 2011)
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