Conference Programme
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available). Note that the schedule is subject to changes.
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Daily Overview |
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Parallel with Discussants 4: Biodiversity, Ecosystems & Finance Location: Seminar Room 7 (Level 2) Session Chair: Cara Vansteenkiste, University of Sydney | |
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Firm Pollution, Streams, and Biodiversity School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, United States of America While investors increasingly view firm impacts on nature as financially material, quantifying corporate biodiversity footprints remains challenging due to the complex nature of biodiversity. We introduce an ecologically grounded, data-driven method for estimating firm-level biodiversity footprints. We showcase our method by applying a spatial difference-in-difference design to a data set combining 30m-resolution forest biodiversity data, water pollution data by U.S. facilities, and hydrological model results. We find that toxic water releases have an adverse effect on the downstream forest ecosystem, reducing the tree density and its species diversity. A standard deviation increase in toxic effluent is associated with a 7.5% decline in tree population in the immediate downstream area, with aggregate water pollution leading to a total loss of 18 million trees over the seven-year sample period. A facility's biodiversity footprint is driven more by its siting in heavily forested areas than by variations in effluent volume. | |