Progress in the boardroom, blind spots in the biosphere

Sustainability has moved from the margins to the boardroom. This much is clear, with 86% of the 750 companies worldwide that have the biggest impacts on nature — from food, mining, paper and other high-impact sectors — assigning responsibility for their sustainability strategy to the board. A little over half of them (55%) also explicitly identify and prioritise their most material sustainability topics, clearly stating where action is needed.

The 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) set a global goal to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, now referred to as achieving a ‘nature-positive’ future. The framework requires specific commitments from countries to ensure that large and transnational companies disclose their biodiversity dependencies, impacts and risks. This makes corporate reporting a core part of national implementation and establishes a firm global expectation: companies must play their part.

A growing coalition of initiatives including TNFD and the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) have also developed robust, credible frameworks and resources that enable businesses and investors to assess their nature-related dependencies, impacts and risks, and take action with confidence.

Yet we’ve found scant evidence that measuring their reliance on biodiversity and ecosystem services has become a widespread practice. Only 14% of the 750 companies assessed measure or disclose the extent of their dependence on these natural systems, despite the fact that they underpin food, water, renewable resources and climate regulation. Their rapid decline is stark, with around one million species now at risk of extinction. As biodiversity erodes, so do the foundations of production, trade and financial stability, creating a systems-level market risk threatening to destabilise entire economies.

Only 9% of companies quantify their nature-related risks

Against this backdrop, many companies are at least beginning to recognise nature-related risks. Two-thirds (66%) identify some nature-related risks, and 42% show evidence of taking concrete action to manage them, including site-level biodiversity assessments, water-reuse systems, hardening facilities against extreme weather, supporting regenerative farming or restoring degraded watersheds. Yet only 9% actually quantify how these risks could affect their operations, financial performance or reputation, and even fewer (5%) quantify the opportunities healthier ecosystems could unlock.

Companies in East Asia and the Pacific are demonstrating that clearer measurement of corporate links to nature is possible. A comparatively high concentration of companies in this region — particularly in Australia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Thailand — disclose their nature-related risks, dependencies and opportunities with greater transparency. By quantifying these dependencies and risks, companies can better anticipate disruptions, allocate resources more effectively and identify opportunities for innovation and resilience.

The first nature transition plans signal a turning point on the horizon

Positively, we see early signs of corporate alignment with the GBF’s global goal. The first guidance for businesses on how to develop nature transition plans was released in late 2024, spearheaded by organisations such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Despite the short time since this guidance became available, 18 (2%) of the assessed companies have already published early iterations of their own nature transition plans, showing that companies are starting to internalise the scale of transformation required to stay within planetary boundaries and maintain long-term resilience and value.

Crucially, these 18 companies come from nine different industries: Apparel, Construction Materials, Containers & Packaging, Food Production, Metals & Mining, Paper & Forest Products, Pharmaceuticals, Tyres & Rubber and Utilities. This shows it is possible for companies in any industry to make meaningful progress, with many more companies having already laid some foundations for nature transition plans, such as governance structures, nature-related targets and stakeholder engagement processes.

These early movers are helping to show what good looks like in practice. Oji Holdings’ 2025 TNFD Report, for instance, discloses a stand-alone nature transition plan that shows some integration between the company’s approaches to biodiversity, climate change and resource circularity, and provides solid detail across the key pillars of a nature transition plan, such as governance and strategy. There are, however, opportunities to add further quantification of transition financing and capital allocation, which would strengthen its credibility by making the scale of investment explicit and showing that the strategy is backed by resourcing decisions. Vattenfall’s 2024 Annual and Sustainability Report also demonstrates good practice by explicitly linking some internal targets to the GBF and giving initial, albeit high-level, indications of the resources that will be allocated to biodiversity-related actions.

These examples point to growing corporate momentum. Other companies can now follow the lead of these 16 early movers and not wait for a perfect, fully mature product before disclosure. Publishing an early nature transition plan sends an important internal and external signal about the strategic relevance of nature, even while recognising that the plan will continue to evolve over time as data quality, internal capabilities and external expectations improve.

Overall, our findings suggest that a small but growing group of leaders is beginning to address what has long been a strategic blind spot. The takeaway is simple: companies need to manage their nature risks now to avoid a future where they become unmanageable.