The Quiet Shift: Integrating Natural Capital & Ecosystem Services into Business Risk & Opportunity Assessment

A quiet, but potentially significant, shift is under way in how we understand business risk and opportunity. A systems thinking frame is clicking into business analysts lens’ in order to improve focus. 

This shift means that at some point in the coming years, gone will be the days in which companies can track only the trend line of their work on issue-specific performance indicators, such as carbon emissions, water usage, human rights violations, worker issues, and numerous other environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Instead, with increasing demands on natural resources around the world, there is a growing need to understand corporate resource uses, and impacts, within the context of total user demands and total resource availability. 

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Sissel Waage, Ph.D. is the director of biodiversity and ecosystem services at BSR. She has over 20 years of experience working on environmental and sustainability issues in North America, Europe and Africa. Her areas of focus have included sustainable business, corporate environmental strategy, water risk and opportunity, ecosystem services, biodiversity,  ecological restoration, and green infrastructure.