The International Finance Corporation (IFC), an arm of the World Bank, screen investments across economic, social and environmental domains. Recognising the potential to advance quantitative assessments in the environmental domain to better capture the stock of natural capital and the flows of ecosystem services and benefits, the IFC contracted IDEEA Group, as part of a larger consortium, to create three different tools to assess the potential impacts of investments on the natural capital.
The three tools, which are designed to quantify the potential impact of investments in the agribusiness sector, the plastics sector and e-mobility sector, utilise global datasets on natural capital, and apply a range of approaches including life cycle impact analysis, state impact models, and ecosystem service valuation. The work is underpinned by the development of impact pathways, and an innate understanding of global natural capital datasets, both of which can readily be applied in other contexts.