[Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the BSR Insight and is reprinted with permission.]

In March, the apparel company Puma joined a growing roster of companies trying to improve their understanding of corporate performance by placing a dollar value on their use of “ecosystem services,” the natural systems that businesses rely on to provide raw materials, adequate supplies of clean water, and protection from natural disasters.

Following in the footsteps of companies like Dow Chemical, which launched a US$10 million initiative to value and incorporate nature into its global business decisions, and Disney, which passed a corporate policy to produce a “net positive impact” on ecosystems, Puma plans to produce an environmental profit-and-loss statement that reflects its full economic impact on ecosystem services.

As interest in this area grows, companies such as Parametrix and Exponent have developed tools businesses can use to measure and value ecosystem services. While this is a positive development, the value of these tools has been difficult to determine, most notably due to the limited number of tests in corporate settings, as well as uncertainty related to data, time, expertise, and costs required to run the tools.

To address this challenge, BSR’s Ecosystem Services, Tools & Markets Working Group set up a pilot test to compare the performance of seven tools in one potential corporate application: What are the potential impacts of a hypothetical large-scale residential housing development in the U.S. state of Arizona’s San Pedro watershed, in which there would be both increased water demands and disturbances to the Chihuahuan desert scrub associated with the development? We asked each tool team to focus on four parameters: water provisioning, carbon sequestration, cultural services, and biodiversity. For each tool, we also tracked the time, cost, level of expertise required, and other factors associated with its use.

The pilot test showed that while side-by-side comparisons are difficult due to significant differences among the tools and their intended applications, there is an opportunity to refine the approach of the tools as a whole to make them more useful to companies looking for an effective “off-the-shelf” application that can also fit into existing corporate protocols.

The Challenge of Side-by-Side Comparisons

There is an ongoing debate over how to translate ecosystem services concepts into clear, commonly accepted measures that can inform decision-making. This debate is reflected in the diverse set of methods and metrics applied by each tool-developer team, and, as a result, it is not easy to directly compare one tool to another.

For example, ARIES and InVEST are both computer models that conduct detailed, landscape-level analyses and simulations of potential activities. But the comparison ends there. ARIES provides maps of ecosystem services flows using data within artificial-intelligence-enabled models. That tool also shows levels of certainty. InVEST, on the other hand, applies ecological-attribute data of land-use land-cover data types within an ArcGIS environment.