As global biodiversity declines at rates never before seen in human history, the pressure on corporates to elevate nature alongside climate atop their sustainability agendas has never been greater. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and in particular its Target 15 related to business disclosure of biodiversity impacts, may not yet be common knowledge amongst corporate sustainability professionals. However, chances are they are experiencing a marked increase in investor and customer inquiries on nature-related issues and possibly facing new external pressures to assess, disclose, and mitigate their nature-related impacts.

The Taskforce on Nature Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) is the leading global framework providing guidance on how companies should report, and act on, nature-related issues in their value chain. Pure Strategies recently conducted an informal poll of approximately 30 U.S. based sustainability professionals about their company’s current level of engagement with TNFD. The results indicated there was a small cadre of early adopters actively preparing to disclose using the TNFD framework. The majority, while keenly aware of TNFD and actively tracking its developments, were still feeling their way forward and managing through a lack of expertise on an inherently complex topic.

A great place to get familiar with TNFD is with the program’s guidance on how to get started. In addition to this and other guidance from TNFD, there are a few practical considerations to keep in mind to help your company move forward in assessing its relationship with nature.

Prioritize internal stakeholder management.

Much has been written about the similarities between TNFD and The Taskforce on Climate Related Disclosures (TCFD). Building on TCFD’s momentum, TNFD was built on the same four pillars of governance, strategy, risk and impact management as well as metrics and targets. Eleven of TNFD’s 14 recommended disclosures mirror those of TCFD, with references to “climate” replaced by “nature.” However, nature has unique characteristics relative to climate that companies may need to account for to effectively bring their organization along a nature disclosure journey.

Nature is complex. It is a beautifully tangled web of interactions and interdependencies. However, because of that complexity, there is no nature equivalent to climate’s singular CO2-eq measurement metric. On top of that, understanding of nature-related issues and impacts within companies, including senior leadership, is still fairly limited.

Yet, for many companies, nature is integral to product design and the customer experience. My favorite pair of alpine skis has a wood core made from two species of trees carefully chosen by the company’s product designers to deliver a certain balance of strength and weight to achieve specific on-the-snow performance characteristics. There are myriad examples like this across different product and service categories highlighting the inherent dependence on nature in corporate go-to-market strategies.

And while corporate climate disclosures can be somewhat abstract, for emissions-factor-driven exercises, nature has a face and a place. Whether it’s the face of a threatened species, a giant old-growth tree, or the Indigenous person who calls “nature” their home, nature can be a highly personal and tangible topic.

Limited internal understanding of issues integral to the business, that also come with heightened external sensitivities, can be a challenging recipe for robust public disclosure. It is also why such disclosures, and the work that underpins them, are so critically important. A first step companies can take is developing an equally robust internal stakeholder management plan that engages a broad cross-section of the company, helping key decision makers and influencers understand the issues, while making the business case for transparency and action.

Lean in with external stakeholders.

Some companies may also be experiencing pressure from external stakeholders to publicly disclose nature-related dependencies, risks, impacts, and opportunities across their value chain. This can include requests from the growing area of nature-related investor initiatives, downstream customers responding to the market’s heightened focus on nature, or from non-profit conservation organizations working to protect and restore nature through corporate engagement strategies.

It is wise to lean into engagements with those audiences to fully understand their perspective on your company’s nature impacts, and their expectations on actions the company should take in response. Use these engagements proactively to ask informed questions and incorporate the learnings into how to scope your company’s nature impact assessment. These groups are often subject matter experts that can help fill internal nature knowledge gaps. They are also the audiences most likely to read your nature disclosure cover to cover and respond to its findings. While your company may not fully align with all their perspectives, ensuring that their ideas are addressed adequately and credibly is important.

Start small to build internal momentum.

For many companies, the full scope of their value chain’s interface with nature can be expansive, making it seem overwhelming in knowing where and how to start. It may be best to start small by picking a single product, value chain, or service that represents a significant portion of revenue or has known high-nature impacts. Then, use TNFD’s Locate, Evaluate, Assess, Prepare (LEAP) and Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) Steps 1 and 2 guidance to help outline the process and ensure the outputs are sufficiently robust to be used in a potential future enterprise-level disclosure or target setting process.

The results of this initial assessment will provide a starting point to build knowledge and secure support from internal stakeholders. It will kickstart supplier engagement as you work to source the necessary data, along with identifying key data gaps for closure. It will also begin to provide line of sight to potential mitigation strategies.

Map the value chain.

Nature impact assessment is a location-based exercise. This often starts with high-level information about sourcing regions and then progresses as quickly as possible to more geographically precise spatial data. There are three main categories of spatial data needed for assessing corporate nature impacts:

• Value chain – where does the product or service derive from the land and/or water
• Environmental – what is the state of nature in those locations and what are the nature pressures/impacts that the business brings to these locations
• Social – what is the presence of Indigenous peoples and local communities in those locations and the degree of overlap with their traditional lands and/or waters

In sourcing environmental spatial data, think “global to local” and budget accordingly. While it is possible to source high-quality environmental spatial data from open sources, some datasets, such as the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT), require subscription/data access costs. And while global datasets are incredibly useful in highlighting high-level risks at scale, more localized datasets may better capture key nature-related issues within your footprint that global datasets may overlook.

Seek out subject matter expertise and support.

TNFD-aligned nature disclosure requires subject matter expertise that most companies do not have fully represented on staff, so seeking out external support may be necessary. This may come from a combination of consultants, like Pure Strategies, environmental non-profit organizations that the company already partners with, or new partners in areas like academia or government.

Some companies are also starting to build in-house nature and biodiversity expertise. One of our clients, VF Corporation, recently posted a position for a Senior Climate and Nature Data Analyst, which is part of a wider trend in sustainability-related hiring as the corporate focus on nature grows.

Finally, while I have isolated “nature” relative to “climate” in this discussion to help illustrate some of nature’s unique considerations as it pertains specifically to advancing corporate nature disclosures, the reality is that the climate and biodiversity crises are one in the same and must be addressed in concert. For more information on how corporations can connect their climate and nature strategies to address these dual and interlinked crises, refer to the Pure Strategies report on “Planet-Forward Strategies.”