PIE
THE PLACE-BASED IMPACT ESTIMATOR
Explore the potential of different places to ACT on your diverse social and environmental investment objectives, mitigate water and biodiversity risks, and limit trade-offs.
PIE can help in decision making and provide an objective and quantifiable analysis of where to start acting and why.
OUR MODULES
The WWF Place-based Impact Estimator (PIE) is a free geospatial tool that helps organizations identify optimal locations for conservation, restoration, or land-management investment by balancing multiple environmental and social objectives, such as carbon storage, halting species loss, and avoiding conflict with agriculture. Users define their project or portfolio goals in PIE and the tool generates personalized maps highlighting where action is most likely to deliver combined, high-impact outcomes.
1
Visualize the spatial data that will help you to build your unique strategy
2
Run the optimization, view, and interpret the results
3
Utilize PIE’s results to build more impactful and efficient work in collaboration with local nature and people
What makes PIE relevant for companies?
A key challenge for businesses in creating their sustainability strategies is understanding and evaluating the most material places to start acting. Funding and geographies always provide constraints around what is possible for investments in climate and nature – a company cannot work everywhere at once and given a limited amount of funding it is important to be able to assess where actions would be most efficient and impactful. However, given the range of issues for which sustainability is important for companies across their impacts on climate, freshwater, land, and biodiversity it is a challenge to explore where corporate investments could have the most impact.
Further, the actions that are available to a company in the range of places they may be interested in are limited based on a wide range of differences including partnerships, land tenure, ecology, local interest and capacity, and the type of company. Further confounding these decisions is that actions taken to address one issue (e.g. carbon) can often have negative impacts on other issues (e.g., biodiversity).
PIE is a tool that allows companies to work through these complexities and constraints in a clear and non-technical method. It delivers a high-level assessment of where investment would be most optimal, limiting trade-offs among objectives, and delivering impacts in the places that are most material to the company, its customers, local people, and nature.
FAQs
PIE is one of the best ways to understand where the most impactful places for a project or investment might be, based on the capacity of places to respond to conservation, protection, improved management or restoration; or where impact avoidance from agricultural conversion is most needed. It uses key datasets on the potential of places to deliver impact combined with your objectives and investment context to screen for places where one action could deliver on multiple benefits for people and nature. To use PIE, simply select the geographies that are interesting to you, actions that you might want to take, and any initiatives you might be interested in to see suggestions for best places to explore investing for multiple benefits.
The use cases for PIE include both those who have completed an analysis using the Water Risk Filter and/or The Biodiversity Risk Filter as well as those that have not. Completing a risk analysis is not required to utilize PIE. PIE is useful for companies looking at which areas to invest in, for donors and project managers to evaluate the potential impacts across many different candidate areas or landscapes, and for project managers to better understand the optimal areas for action within countries or landscapes.
Importantly, PIE is designed for non-experts and for people without skills or experience using geographic information systems (GIS), but those with such experience can download results and complete additional analyses if they wish.
Yes, an account is required, which will help you keep track of how you've built your assessments and a record of the optimization results.
Visit our Data & Methods page to learn how to use PIE. While PIE is free and open to use, WWF is open to working with users on different applications of the tool and in exploring new and interesting use cases. Please contact us at [email protected]
