In this white paper by Tom Miller, Jib Ellison, Lee Kranefuss and Peter Seligmann we explain how an unprecedented level of concrete action that is now underway to link global economic activity and the value of critical services provided by ecosystems is creating a significant business opportunity in financial services.

For the past few thousand years – with the exception of land and mineral rights – we haven’t had the mindset to place a dollar value on earth’s ecological resources. As a result, the real competitive cost of those resources has not factored into business decision-making.  Businesses have come to rely on a lot of ‘free’ goods and services: whether it is the right to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the unimpeded opportunity to harvest forest on private land, or the ability to use and divert water from watersheds for agricultural or industrial use.  Until now, tangible value has been placed on many things humans enjoy – but not on the life support systems that underpin their existence.

Those days are over. In the next five years, we’ll see broad-based recognition that these goods and services are ­­­­­not free. We’ll see the emergence of new industry standards with well-developed markets and metrics to measure, price, trade, and hedge (or offset) the sustainability of individual company activities across entire value chains. As ecosystem services become more measurable and transparent, we’ll be on a new playing field for how companies compete and how they get evaluated...

Click here to download the full white paper.