Dependency of Businesses on Flows of Ecosystem Services: A Case Study from the County of Dorset, UK

Abstract

Although it is widely assumed that business activity is dependent on flows of ecosystem services (ES), little evidence is available with which to evaluate this contention. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a questionnaire survey of business dependencies on twenty-six different ES in the English county of Dorset, where the environment supports a significant component of the local economy. Responses were received from 212 businesses across twenty-eight sectors. While virtually all businesses (98%) were familiar with the concept of ES, dependency on ES was highly divided with 50% of businesses surveyed claiming no dependence on any ES flows. The highest businesses dependencies reported in this study were for regulating services with the ES of water quality and waste water treatment being of particular importance to businesses. The results however, advised that greater efforts are needed in highlighting the indirect benefits provided by Dorset's ecosystems, with eight business sectors (58% of respondents) claiming no or little dependence on supporting and habitat services including the ES of biodiversity, habitats for species and maintenance of genetic diversity. Many businesses also indicated little or no dependence on the globally important ES of pollination and soil condition, which may reflect a lack of awareness of dependencies occurring upstream of their value chains. At the sector level, businesses directly involved in protecting, extracting, or manufacturing raw materials were found to be more dependent on provisioning, regulatory and supporting ES than those operating in the service sector who favored cultural ES. These results highlight the value of assessing business dependencies on ES flows, which could usefully inform environmental management and accounting systems and improve monitoring of business performance, and thereby contribute to achievement of sustainability goals.

Ecological restoration of agricultural land can improve its contribution to economic development

“…The most important of these is the assumption that business performance is linearly related to ES flows, as captured by the ES dependency values obtained from a questionnaire survey. The potential limitations of the questionnaire data are explored by Watson and Newton [ 45 ]. Chief among these is the issue of sampling; it is conceivable that a different set of dependency values would have been obtained from a different set of respondents.…”

“…For this reason we performed an additional set of calculations that factored in variation in the demands of different economic sectors for different ES. For this analysis, we employed values describing the dependence of different economic sectors on ES provision provided by Watson and Newton [ 45 ], based on a survey of 212 Dorset businesses drawn from 28 different sectors ( S4 Appendix ). In this survey, dependencies of businesses on flows of different ES were elicited on a five-point Likert scale, ranging from 0 (“not at all dependent”) to 1 (“entirely dependent”).…”

“…Relative changes in ES flow for each scenario were then calculated as a proportion of the initial values. The values of relative change in each ES were then multiplied by the mean dependency values for each individual economic sector obtained from [ 45 ]. These values were then summed to provide a combined measure of change in business performance, taking into account changes in all ES and the dependency of different economic sectors upon them.…”

Is the Focus on “Ecosystems” a Liability in the Research on Nature's Services?

“…In that context, one could argue that the "mismatch between legal units and ecological phenomena" (Vejre et al, 2015) that characterizes much of the literature in the field, may be one of the root causes of the documented slow progression from theory to practice in the economic valuation and management of ecosystem services (Laurans et al, 2013;Laurans and Mermet, 2014). That there is enormous room for improvement in this respect is underscored particularly clearly by the recently published research of Watson and Newton (2018). These authors conducted a survey of business dependencies on 26 different ecosystem services in the English county of Dorset, "where the environment supports a significant portion of the local economy."…”

What makes businesses commit to nature conservation?

“…So far, the scientific literature provides limited empirical research about business commitments for nature conservation in particular. Related studies investigated, for instance, business perceptions towards the ecosystem services concept, for example, D'Amato, Wan, Li, Rekola, and Toppinen (2018) and Watson and Newton (2018); company involvement in payments for ecosystem services, for example, Davies et al (2018) and Thompson (2018a); and biodiversity‐related reporting practices, for example, Addison et al (2018), Hassan, Roberts, and Atkins (2020), Potdar, Gautam, Singh, Unnikrishnan, and Naik (2016), and Smith, Paavola, and Holmes (2018). Given the still nascent body of biodiversity‐related business literature, no study—to the best of the authors' knowledge—has investigated the drivers of corporate conservation commitments by means of quantitative data.…”