Forward-looking businesses are putting nature at the heart of strategy – not just to protect the planet, but to unlock resilience, profitability, and long-term value.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when thinking about our impact on nature, yet with challenges come opportunities for significant shifts – and real solutions. There is a positive current that can be felt in our community of businesses and beyond, but the problem is it’s not always reaching the headlines.
The good news is that businesses like yours are turning their heads to focus on nature: our understanding of it and our respect for it. They are putting it in its rightful place; at the heart of strategic decisions and business planning. When nature is properly factored in, impact drives prosperity and purpose fuels performance. Here at Greenheart we can’t be happier about this, as nature is at the heart of our core values and its wisdom informs everything we do.
If you’re ready to start building your nature strategy and how you can incorporate nature into your materiality assessments, here are some pointers.
Identify dependencies, risks and opportunities
1. Identify where you have critical dependencies on nature.
Dependencies are aspects of environmental assets and services an organisation relies on to function. For example, key raw materials in your supply chain rely on having adequate water and healthy soils to grow. Manufacturing sites often need large volumes of energy and to dispose of effluent. At the downstream end of the value chain, nature has to absorb the impact of process or packaging waste. Employees need clean air and a climate that they can function in.
2. Map out corresponding risks to your business.
Broadly, these can be split into two types of risk: physical and transition.
To assess physical risks we need to ask questions like: what would happen if we had a shortage of X material due to drought? What would happen in our operations if we see over 2.5°C of global warming, our current emissions track? How would our employees and supply chain cope? Some of these are ‘acute’ (short term/immediate) and some will be longer term, or ‘chronic’ risks.
Transition risks include changes to policy, market conditions, technology, disclosure requirements or risks to the company’s reputation arising from failure to address these risks. They are often harder to predict.
Spanning both areas is the key risk of litigation. Climate-related litigation has been understood and costed in for a while now (though not universally) and biodiversity-related claims are fast catching up. This is a whole other topic – expect to see more on this from us soon.
3. Highlight opportunities to mitigate these risks.
For physical risks, this could be putting measures in place to support raw material farmers to farm regeneratively, growing trees around offices to provide natural cooling or reshaping business models towards circularity.
Transitional risks might involve team training and awareness, specifically ensuring that compliance personnel know what to look for. It could also be investing in R&D to transition your business model to take advantage of the opportunities of a low carbon future economy.
In all cases, we’d recommend factoring these risks into your overall governance processes, for example by ensuring they are adequately covered in the risk register.
Understand the impact of your business on nature
1. Understand your interfaces with nature
You can use a map of your value chain to identify where your main interfaces with nature are and highlight key interactions. This should cover everything from raw materials sourcing to what happens to your product and packaging at its end of life. If you are a service-based business, think about your supply chain, the products you buy, energy you use and transport you take.
Assess how your value chain activities either contribute or combat the five drivers of biodiversity loss:
- Climate change
- Pollution
- Land use change
- Water use
- Invasive species
Remember that you don’t have to know everything straight away and you can add layers of detail as you deepen your understanding.
2. Be location specific
Here comes the interesting part. Look at what is happening in the areas where you source materials and operate.
What is the state of the environment in the areas you source from, where materials are processed and manufactured? What is the impact of the data you store on local water supplies? Also, what is the state of nature-related legislation or litigation activity in that market. This is the point where local engagement really helps. Interview local stakeholders to find out more about how you can support nature in those environments.
Building nature into strategy in practice:
One of our clients took a deep dive into its supply chain and identified materials that had an adverse impact on nature. It used this information to inform a decision to stop buying these with imminent effect.
Another client learnt its manufacturing sites were in an area that had been devastated by wildfires and suffering ecological breakdown. It vowed to invest into wildfire risk-appropriate tree planting in areas local to its sites, in partnership with local groups. It can now integrate wildfire preparedness into its risk strategy too, to mitigate the impact in the event of wildfires both financially (loss of product, delay, insurance premiums) and to the local ecosystem and people.
We are also supporting one of our clients by analysing data to identify priority locations for nature action. This will support it to prevent reputational and litigation risk, future proof its operations and have the biggest possible positive impact on local environments and communities.
Embedding nature for resilience, prosperity and long-term value
The new B Corp standards reflect the importance of considering nature impact and risk. They’re followed by other UK, European and international reporting standards. We now also have comprehensive frameworks in place to help businesses understand nature dependency and risk through the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and on how to set meaningful targets for nature action through Science Based Targets for Nature (SBTN). Nature considerations should also be embedded in your materiality and risk planning processes.
Let’s face it – we rely on nature.
And if we’re not looking after nature, we’re not looking after ourselves, our businesses, our livelihoods or our futures. Through our materiality assessment process, we help businesses break down these processes into simple, actionable steps. Along the way, our clients uncover vital insights that support truly sustainable business evolution – and they often enjoy the process too, because practical insights determine where tangible meaningful action can be taken. After all, isn’t that what sustainability should be all about?
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