World is Green

Noam Ross writes about the honey bee pollination service and the importance of ecosystem services to a business.

If your business’s only supplier of a key service folded all of a sudden, what would you do?

That is what a lot of agricultural companies are asking themselves right now. As reported in the New York Times last week, honeybee colonies in 24 states have collapsed. Colony populations have crashed by 30-70 percent, causing bee prices to skyrocket at and sending a $14 billion agricultural sector scrambling for insects to pollinate their crops. Yet there are not many options out there. The U.S. agriculture has grown increasingly dependent on trucked-in bees as natural pollinator populations have declined from habitat fragmentation and pesticides since the mid-20th century.

If a business had such a clear warning about its supply chain, one would think it would work to diversify or at least do what they could to shore up their suppliers to ensure their continued viability. Yet as we’re learning from the bee crisis, few companies examine the risks related to ecosystem services, like pollination, that they rely on. These risks may be large — according to the Millennium Assessment, two-thirds of ecosystems worldwide are being degraded or used unsustainably, and degradation will likely accelerate over the next 50 years.

Hanson is leading the development of a “Corporate Ecosystem Services Review”, a methodology to assess business risk and new opportunities arising from the damaged state of ecosystems. The review will be designed to help companies figure out what ecosystem services they depend on and impact most, and then devise strategies to deal with the risks and opportunities represented.