In January, ERM, Salesforce, Planet, and NatureMetrics launched the NatureTech Alliance at the World Economic Forum in Davos to help companies harness advanced data and technology to tackle their most urgent nature challenges. The Alliance’s overall aim is to develop an integrated toolkit focusing on:
- Providing visibility into nature impacts, dependencies, and risks and opportunities
- Effectively managing nature-related data and reporting
- Shifting corporate nature strategy from commitments to nature-positive outcomes
- Navigating complex and still nascent regulatory landscapes
- Driving cross-value chain and cross-sector collaboration
- Directing private capital flows towards high-impact, nature-positive activities
After multiple client conversations in early 2024 it became clear that many companies are still getting their heads around the challenge. So, in late summer, the Alliance set out to better understand the common nature-related challenges companies face across their value chains - and how they are using nature tech to solve them.
Through a series of interviews with leading players, the Alliance identified these challenges as well as examples of successful actions being pursued to manage them and create business value. Seven key insights emerged, painting a clear picture of the current obstacles and opportunities for effective corporate nature action.
Seven critical insights on corporate nature action
1 - Nature risk is both global and highly local
Nature-related risks, such as water scarcity, biodiversity loss, or deforestation, vary greatly by location, but companies and financial institutions often rely on coarse global data that fails to capture local nuances. Companies may rely on aggregated global biodiversity or water stress indices, which overlook critical local factors such as regional ecosystem dynamics or community-level water usage. This mismatch can lead to blind spots in risk management, resulting in poor decision-making, operational disruptions, or even regulatory non-compliance.
2 - The link between nature risk and enterprise risk is still under-developed
Many companies struggle to integrate nature-related risks into broader sustainability strategies and enterprise risk frameworks. Nature is often treated separately from climate change, despite their deep interdependencies. Deforestation, for example, not only drives biodiversity loss and threatens water supplies but also worsens climate change by releasing stored carbon. Integrating nature-related data into strategic planning, risk management, and financial forecasting is critical for improving resilience and maintaining commercial performance.
3 - Lack of corporate decision-maker and investor understanding hinders nature-positive growth
Despite growing interest in sustainability in general, many corporate decision-makers and investors struggle to grasp complex nature-related data. This gap between scientific insight and corporate and investment intelligence slows the adoption of nature-positive strategies. Companies and investors need better tools to communicate nature-related risks and opportunities in ways that resonate with stakeholders.
4 - Companies are moving from "do no harm" to "net positive"
There is a noticeable shift from companies aiming to mitigate their negative nature-related impacts (e.g., reducing deforestation, using fewer agrochemicals) to embracing net-positive strategies (e.g., biodiversity restoration, reforestation). It is no longer enough to avoid harming nature—companies are also increasingly expected to restore ecosystems and contribute positively . Yet many companies have only piloted these efforts, hindered by challenges such as site-level data availability and the complexity of measuring and managing nature-related outcomes and impacts across global operations.
5 - Financial institutions are lagging behind other sectors but have the potential to scale nature-positive investments
Financial institutions are lagging behind sectors such as food and agriculture and extractives in integrating nature-related data into their decision-making processes. However, they are increasingly waking up to nature-related risks, such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, soil erosion, and invasive species.
As financial services companies become more proficient in understanding and incorporating these risks, their significant influence of capital flows will start to show.
Their ability to request comparable disclosures, such as biodiversity risk metrics or ecosystem service valuations, will extract due diligence for decision-making and position them to drive the standardization of nature-related data reporting. By pushing for disclosures that go beyond regulatory requirements, some financial institutions are beginning to play a key role in accelerating nature-positive investments across industries.
6 - Outcome-based metrics are the future, but few have figured it out
Companies are moving from practice-based metrics, focused on inputs like reduced fertilizer use, to outcome-based metrics that measure real-world results for biodiversity and ecosystem health. This shift is essential because outcome-based metrics provide clearer insights into actual environmental impact, such as species diversity or soil health. Such metrics can also clearly connect company actions with nature-positive outcomes and the business values they yield.
Scaling this transition is difficult due to the complexity of measuring biodiversity, the lack of standardized methodologies, and challenges in collecting reliable data. Companies are beginning to address these hurdles by using technologies like remote sensing and eDNA, and collaborating with experts to better track and report outcomes across their operations and supply chains.
7- Data fragmentation is the biggest barrier, not a lack of technology alone
While advanced technologies like AI, remote sensing, and geospatial platforms are available, companies face significant challenges in managing fragmented and inconsistent nature-related data. Many organizations already collect site-level data through impact assessment or environmental compliance monitoring, but integrating these localized datasets with other data sources—across supply chains, portfolios, use cases, and geographies—remains a major hurdle.
This fragmentation is often a bigger barrier than the availability of tools to evaluate the data. Companies that rely heavily on external data sources may encounter gaps in data quality and relevance which can slow or misdirect their progress towards nature-positive outcomes. A very few leading companies are beginning to apply advanced technologies and platforms to address this challenge, standardizing and translating disparate nature-related datasets into enterprise-wide insights for risk management and reporting.
We have formed a common vision for how to harness the power of nature technologies to solve these challenges. At its foundation is a performance framework that outlines how companies are progressing from compliance focuses to more innovative, outcome-based actions.
- Unified data and reporting platforms for nature and biodiversity: Companies require a unified data platform for consolidating internal and external data on nature-related risks and opportunities. A centralized dashboard will help companies overcome a previously fragmented and inconsistent data landscape that has limited action.
- Outcome-based metrics and predictive analytics: Companies must shift from practice-based metrics (e.g., progress against a target or certification) to outcome-based metrics. Making this change will enable companies to move from a reactive compliance mindset to one focused on proactive nature-positive growth.
- Cross-sector, multi-stakeholder collaboration on solutions: A cooperative environment in which companies, governments, NGOs, and investors exchange data, learnings, and innovations to address landscape level nature-related risks is key to driving the collective action required to restore ecosystems.
- Scalable and cost-effective nature-positive investments: Nature-positive investments must be profitable, scalable, and conventional in order to move past traditional philanthropic and government-backed nature-related funding. Doing so will require incentives and market instruments that generate capital flows, particularly in land-use-intensive sectors.
- Intuitive and accessible tools for all stakeholders: Convenient tools that enable non-expert users to easily adopt, understand, manage, and report on nature-related information. These tools must facilitate good decision-making by incorporating accurate, up-to-date, and verifiable data from local to global sources to mitigate data fragmentation and ensure decision-maker understanding.
- Regulatory-ready solutions with built-in compliance: Companies need a comprehensive nature-related reporting system aligned with emerging disclosure initiatives and existing regulations. By streamlining reporting, this system will help companies stay ahead of evolving regulatory requirements and better link nature risk to enterprise risk.
- Companies shift from “do no harm” to “nature-positive”: Companies are moving from mitigating harm to actively contributing to nature-positive outcomes. Realizing this vision requires improved approaches for assessing outcomes and demonstrating their financial value.
