- Many companies hesitate on nature because they expect another climate-scale lift: years of education, new data, fresh targets, and a standalone program. That expectation, more than the work itself, is what holds them at the starting line.
- Nature is different in two useful ways. It is tangible and present in and around every operation and every person, so teams grasp it quickly. And most companies already run work that touches it.
- The task is less about building something new and more about organizing the efforts already underway and identifying the right next steps toward a strategic approach that helps nature recover.
Companies that have worked hard on climate often pause when nature comes up, and for an understandable reason. Carbon took years of internal education and onboarding and complicated inventories, target-setting, and program building. So, nature looks like the same mountain to climb again. That assumption is one of the biggest reasons companies stall before they start. It is also mostly wrong. Nature differs from climate in two ways that make getting started far more approachable.
Nature is easier to grasp than carbon
Climate is abstract by design. A ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) is invisible, measured at a global scale, and difficult for most people to picture. Nature is the opposite. It is the water a facility draws, the soil a crop depends on, the forest a supplier sources from, and the habitat around a site. Everyone has a direct, physical relationship with it. That makes nature unusually easy to explain, and explanation is often the hardest part of any sustainability effort. When a plant manager, a procurement lead, or a board member can see what is at stake, engagement tends to come faster than it does for carbon. The intuitive quality of the topic is an asset, not a complication.
Most companies already have a starting point
The second difference is that nature work is rarely a blank page and our new report, Nature Navigator outlines this key opportunity. Philanthropy and community programs, operations efforts on energy, water, and waste, responsible sourcing and packaging commitments, and existing climate strategies all touch nature, even when no one has labeled them that way. A regenerative agriculture pilot, a watershed project, a deforestation-free sourcing goal: each is already a connection to nature. The opportunity is to recognize these efforts for what they are and to organize them into a coherent picture, rather than to invent a new program from scratch.
The work is organizing, not originating
Reframed this way, getting started becomes a manageable exercise. Begin by naming the existing efforts that connect to nature and mapping them against the three actions that define progress: protect, restore, and sustainably manage. A gap assessment against the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the international reference for corporate nature ambition, shows quickly where current work aligns and where it falls short. The Pure Strategies Planet-Forward Playbook outlines how to do this. From there, the next steps follow naturally. Assess the business connection to nature where the picture is still thin and build nature objectives into projects already in motion rather than starting up a parallel program that competes for attention and budget. Right-size each step to your readiness across staff, data, expertise, budget, and leadership, and choose the move you can actually finish.
Common next steps
Once existing work is organized, most companies take a common next step – assess where it helps most to do more. There are a few ways to assess nature. Not all companies are ready to do a full value chain risk assessment, but progress can be made with other assessment approaches. Pick the one or two that fits where you are:
- Materiality assessment pinpoints where in your value chain nature pressures are greatest, so effort goes where it matters most.
- A gap assessment against the Global Biodiversity Framework benchmarks your current work against protect, restore, and sustainably manage, showing where you already align and where you fall short.
- A nature or land footprint gives you a single baseline to measure and report progress against.
- A nature risk assessment surfaces the impacts and dependencies across water, land, ocean, and biodiversity, that carry real business risk.
From there, the work is to build nature more into projects already in motion, such as, decarbonization, sourcing, packaging, and product design – and explore new projects that have these multiple benefits. The Nature Navigator shows proven ways to take these next steps, right-size them to your readiness, and what each looks like through real company examples.
What this looks like in practice
Toyota Motor North America had a starting point for biodiversity work at company-owned sites and philanthropic giving. Rather than launch something entirely new, the company organized and extended that work. It assessed the land footprint of its operations, funded off-site conservation equal in size to that footprint, and strengthened its reporting. Only later did the company run a value-chain assessment that opened new projects and broader collaboration. Each step built on the last, and a strategic nature program driving toward helping recover nature emerged from work that was already underway.
The good news
Nature does not have to be the next multi-year climb. It is concrete enough for people to understand quickly, and most companies are further along than they realize. The destination, helping nature recover, is well defined, and the frameworks and peer examples to get there already exist.
A practical way to begin is to name the efforts that already touch nature, map them to protect, restore, and sustainably manage, identify the gaps, and choose at least one right-sized next step that organizes the work into a strategy. Companies that start now reduce risk, build resilience, and unlock growth, and they do it by building on what they already have.
The Nature Navigator walks through this approach in more depth, including a worksheet for identifying your own starting points and next steps.
