All businesses have nature in their value chain. Whether directly or indirectly, companies across all sectors depend on natural resources and ecosystem services to develop products, offer services, and maintain operational stability. Nature not only provides raw materials such as water, timber, minerals, and agricultural products but also provides essential services like climate regulation, crop pollination, and air and water purification—fundamental processes for maintaining the balance of natural cycles on our planet, ensuring human well-being, and supporting economic activities across various industries.
Preserving the health of natural ecosystems is a shared responsibility that more and more companies are becoming aware of. Evidence of this includes public environmental commitments made by organizations of all sizes, the creation of roles and departments dedicated to developing environmental sustainability strategies, the progress of global movements such as Net Zero and Nature Positive, and advances in environmental regulations that impose more stringent obligations on businesses to protect the natural world.
This shared responsibility comes with an unavoidable requirement: companies must be able to measure their impact on nature accurately and transparently. Without concrete and precise data, assessing progress, optimizing strategies, and demonstrating commitment is difficult. However, achieving this poses a significant challenge, as environmental impact measurement can be costly, time-consuming, and logistically complex. The good news? Environmental monitoring and analysis tools that leverage advanced technology are readily available today to make this process more efficient.
This article will explore some of the main challenges of measuring environmental impact across large territories. Additionally, we will show you how your company can achieve thin agilely and cost-efficiently using Atlas, our nature intelligence platform, which combines advanced technology with scientifically validated methodologies to provide nature-related data for your areas of interest.
Environmental Quantification: 6 Benefits of Measuring Impact on Nature
Conducting environmental impact assessments is not a peripheral exercise in your business strategy—quite the opposite. Understanding in detail how your company interacts with the natural world throughout its value chain has the potential to directly impact your business model and corporate goals, ensuring operational stability and unlocking new growth opportunities. Here are six benefits for companies investing in environmental analysis:
1. Greater resilience to natural phenomena
Since companies depend directly or indirectly on nature, environmental degradation or ecosystem changes can pose operational and financial risks. By measuring their interface with the natural world, companies can identify their dependencies, anticipate risks, and develop adaptation strategies to ensure long-term sustainability.
2. Optimization of resource use
Many companies use natural resources without fully understanding their consumption efficiency or environmental impact. Measuring impact allows them to identify opportunities to reduce water, energy, and raw material waste, minimizing their ecological footprint and generating significant savings. For example, monitoring land use through satellite data can help agricultural businesses improve irrigation practices, optimizing water consumption without compromising production.
3. Easier regulatory compliance
Environmental regulations are constantly evolving and becoming stricter in different countries, including Chile. From emissions regulations to ecosystem conservation requirements, companies must demonstrate compliance to avoid financial penalties and reputational damage. Having solid data on environmental impact facilitates compliance with these regulations and allows businesses to anticipate future legislative changes, reducing the risk of fines and operational restrictions.
4. Better evidence-based decision-making
Accurate environmental impact measurement provides scientific data that enables companies to design more effective strategies and maximize their positive impact. This helps avoid ineffective strategies or investments with uncertain returns resulting from decisions without reliable information. For example, a renewable energy company can use indicators for biodiversity and ecosystem changes to assess the optimal location for new projects and avoid negative environmental impacts.
5. Ability to demonstrate progress on environmental commitments
More and more companies are publicly committing to reducing their ecological footprint and designing sustainability strategies. Without verifiable data, it is impossible to demonstrate progress toward these commitments and strategies, which can cast doubts on the credibility of these promises and cause lasting damage to the company's reputation.
6. Meeting investor and consumer demands
Investors and consumers increasingly value sustainability. They demand greater transparency and environmental commitment from companies. Investment funds assess a company's impact on nature when making financing decisions, just as consumers prioritize corporate responsibility in their purchasing choices. Therefore, having verifiable environmental metrics can open new business and financing opportunities.
Challenges and Solutions in Environmental Impact Studies
The benefits of measuring the impact on nature are unquestionable. However, saying it is different from doing it. And doing it, as we have mentioned, presents several challenges. Here are some of the main ones, along with what Atlas, our nature intelligence platform, can do to solve them:
1. Cost and resources required for measurement
Rigorous environmental impact measurement requires significant investments in multiple measurement tools and multidisciplinary teams. Sending experts to the field is logistically complex, time-consuming, and costly, as is covering large land areas to install sensors and environmental monitoring tools.
Atlas: By using satellite imagery, our platform enables remote and efficient impact assessment, significantly reducing costs and logistical complexity. Additionally, Atlas provides scientifically validated insights from a multidisciplinary team of nature science experts.
2. Availability and quality of environmental data
To understand an ecosystem's trajectory, companies rely on both historical and updated data that must be reliable and consistent. Working with fragmented information from different sources, low-resolution data, or biased databases makes it difficult to conduct an accurate impact assessment and gain a historical perspective.
Atlas: The models used to build Atlas' nature indicators combine various data sources and are developed with potential biases in mind. These indicators integrate historical data with the best resolutions available to ensure precise and in-depth measurements.
3. Data processing, storage, and analysis
The natural world is complex, and tracking changes in a specific area requires managing vast amounts of data points. Processing, storing, and analyzing these large volumes of information requires robust computational infrastructure and data science experts, which not all companies have at hand.
Atlas: The technological infrastructure on which our platform is built takes on the heavy lifting of this technical challenge. The goal is to provide companies with seamless access to the information they need, enabling them to make strategic decisions quickly while saving time, energy, and money.
4. Difficulty in interpreting and communicating data
Having vast volumes of environmental data without a straightforward way to analyze and visualize it can be overwhelming for many companies. Whether communicating sustainability progress to investors, consumers, and regulators or presenting data internally, interpreting and conveying environmental information is not always easy.
Atlas: Our solution is designed so that both technical and non-technical profiles can interpret and present complex environmental metrics to specialized and non-specialized audiences. Atlas features an intuitive interface with various visualizations, interactive maps, rigorous lists, and easy-to-understand insights for each indicator.
5. Lack of standardized methodologies
There is no single globally accepted framework for measuring environmental impact, leading to differences in results depending on the methodology used. Without clear standards, results can be inconsistent, making it challenging to compare sustainability strategies and impact reports across sectors, industries, and companies.
Atlas: Atlas indicators can be adapted to various global and cutting-edge reporting frameworks, such as GRI, SASB, Nature Positive, and TNFD. Our team can guide any company through this process, ensuring the validity and comparability of the data provided.
6. Compliance with environmental regulations
Environmental regulations are becoming increasingly strict and are continuously updated, meaning companies must constantly adapt to new rules to avoid financial penalties and reputational damage. This is particularly challenging for companies operating in multiple countries or jurisdictions, requiring them to comply with different environmental standards.
Atlas: Through precise and transparent indicators, our solution quantifies a company's impact on nature from a compliance perspective per current regulations and standards. In addition to experts in technology, earth sciences, and data science, our team includes experts on environmental legislation.
7. Lack of integration with other information sources
Many companies already have environmental data from fieldwork or other measurement platforms but lack the tools to integrate all their metrics and achieve a holistic view of their areas of interest. Compatibility issues between environmental monitoring systems and data sources are a common challenge for sustainability units.
Atlas: In addition to the proprietary indicators we have developed and other nature indicators available on the platform, Atlas enables the integration of multiple data sources, serving as a single source of truth (SSOT). For example, Atlas can combine camera trap data, satellite imagery, and external databases in one platform.
Want to Learn More About Atlas?
Our nature intelligence platform gathers dozens of environmental indicators in categories such as carbon, biodiversity, vegetation, climate, risk, and water. Our indicators can be applied to your areas of interest to help you make agile, evidence-based decisions about the natural world.
In addition, one of the key features of our platform is its flexibility and ability to adapt to different companies and needs, helping them solve nature measurement challenges.
If your company wants to understand its relation with the natural world in greater detail or has a particular challenge in measuring environmental impact, don't hesitate to get in touch. You can schedule a free demo in just a few minutes. That way, we can learn about your company's needs and explore solutions together.
