EcoService Models Library (ESML)

Document: ESII Tool (Doc-391)

391
Authors
EcoMetrix Solutions Group (ESG)
Year
2016
Title
ESII Tool
Document Type
Web Page
Abstract
Background In 2011, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and The Dow Chemical Company (Dow) initiated a collaborative effort to develop models that would help Dow and the wider business community identify and incorporate the value of nature into business decision making. As this collaboration progressed, it became clear that to advance or promote the valuation of ecosystem services across a large corporation such as Dow, a tool was needed to assess those services rapidly and cost-effectively. The tool should enable the company to identify and quantify the ecosystem services provided by a site and produce results that could easily be incorporated into existing company engineering and financial models. Ideally, the tool would help identify ecosystem services not previously identified on the site, and support educational efforts to build awareness of the value and benefits of nature, across Dow sites and beyond. Based on more than two years of development and testing at a number of Dow sites across the US with a team of ecologists and other scientists, economists, engineers, and business managers, the Ecosystem Services Identification & Inventory (ESII) Tool achieves this goal. A tablet-based Field App and web-based Project Workspace, the ESII Tool meets the quantification and educational components of the original concept while providing strong scenario analysis and decision support capabilities. ESII will be an essential support tool in Dow’s new 2025 Goal to Value Nature, which aims to identify $1 billion worth of value to Dow from projects that also demonstrate stewardship of natural resources. While Version 1 of the ESII Tool was created with Dow’s business needs in mind, the Dow–TNC Collaboration is making the ESII Tool freely available to the public to promote more widespread awareness of the value of nature to businesses and communities and to encourage the broad uptake of ESII concepts and the ESII Tool. A community of practitioners, The ESII Tool Commons, is being established to help guide the continued growth and evolution of the Tool. Future versions of the ESII Tool will expand upon the functions and services currently available, as well as add new functions, services, and functionality related to unique geographies and the modeling of benefit flows. We hope you will join the Commons and become part of this evolution! Intended Use The ESII Tool (Version 1) was developed to help businesses such as Dow incorporate the value of nature into their business processes, strategies, and decisions. As such, the ESII Tool models and outputs were constructed and tested with an engineering and design perspective to facilitate actionable land use and management decisions. The ESII Tool helps non-ecologists make relative comparisons of the expected levels of ecosystem service performance across a given site, under a variety of conditions. As a planning-level tool, it can inform business decisions while enhancing the user’s relationship with nature. However, other uses that require ecological models of a higher degree of accuracy and/or precision, expert data collection, extensive sampling, and analysis of ecological relationships are beyond the intended scope of this tool. The ESII Tool framework, like nature, will evolve over time. Future versions will include a broader suite of ecological functions, ecosystem services, and supporting services and will encompass broader geographies (currently, ESII is best suited to temperate climates).
URL Exit
https://www.esiitool.com/
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