Corporate Biodiversity and Water Impact and Risk: Seven Key Principles for Leveraging Insights From Satellite Remote Sensing

Abstract

Amid unprecedented biodiversity loss and water scarcity, calls for corporate responsibility are becoming louder and have led to emerging non-financial disclosure frameworks with demanding data needs. While the role of satellite remote sensing (RS) is highly anticipated to address data needs and boost transparency, critical thought on what is feasible and how to strategically integrate its insights for ambitious corporate biodiversity and water disclosure is lagging behind. To address this, we propose applying a systems perspective to represent the complex, multi-scale interactions between biodiversity, water systems, and corporate operations, and to guide how to integrate RS contributions to analyze the full spectrum of impacts and risks—ranging from direct and concurrent to cascading, cumulative, and emergent. We highlight seven guiding (non-exhaustive) principles for leveraging satellite RS data to assess corporate biodiversity and water impacts and risks. This process requires an effective system boundary (1) set spatially, temporally, and process-wise. Within which, biodiversity and water's multi-dimensionality (2) needs to be addressed to monitor the spatio-temporal dynamics (3) that characterize ecosystem responses. To attribute risk and impact of detected changes, interactions need to be defined by causality (4) and directionality (5), and ultimately consider compound impacts (6) across commodities, supply chains and portfolios, as well as cross-system interactions (7), for example, between climate change, water and biodiversity. We review each of these principles and related challenges individually, providing a system theory definition, relevant RS capabilities, and research directions. Addressing these seven principles will be crucial to harness satellite RS's potential for comprehensive biodiversity and water disclosure for strong corporate accountability.