From laggards to leaders: Trends revealed by the 2026 Nature Benchmark

At first glance, the results of the 2026 WBA Nature Benchmark are sobering. Across the 750 companies assessed, the average score is just 17 out of 100, highlighting how far current corporate practice still falls short of what is widely understood to be necessary to halt and reverse nature loss.
The scale of the companies assessed sharpens that conclusion: The wider group of 2,000 companies assessed by WBA generates around USD 53 trillion in annual revenue, roughly half of global GDP. Together, they account for 54% of global greenhouse gas emissions, employ over 100 million people directly, and support many hundreds of millions more through their value chains. The Nature Benchmark focuses on those firms most closely associated with significant environmental impacts, including sectors such as mining, food, and apparel. When companies of this scale fail to act, the consequences are systemic, reinforcing the interconnected climate, nature, and social crises that define today’s ‘polycrisis’.

A closer look at the scores

Nevertheless, the average score masks important differences between companies. Viewed as a distribution rather than a single headline figure, three patterns stand out

First, a cluster of laggards scores close to zero. These are disproportionately private companies, facing less legislative pressure to disclose sustainability information and limited accountability to public shareholders and others. Their weak performance highlights the role of external pressure in driving action: where companies are not required to explain themselves, complacency is more common.

Second, around two-thirds of companies fall into a broad middle band, scoring between 10 and 30. These followers acknowledge nature-related issues at a high level but have yet to embed them meaningfully into strategy or decision-making. This group is critical. Experience suggests that followers rarely move on ambition alone; stronger regulatory, market, and investor pressure is often necessary to prompt them to adopt the practices already demonstrated by leading peers.

Third, a long but thin upper tail, roughly 10% of companies scoring between 30 and 60, represents the leaders. These companies are already taking concrete steps to understand and manage their impacts and dependencies on nature, clearly demonstrating what is feasible in practice.

Notably, every indicator in the Nature Benchmark is now met by at least one company, which was not the case in the previous iteration. This is particularly significant given that the methodology has been revised and become more demanding in areas where guidance and expectations have evolved over the past three years. Despite tighter requirements, some companies have moved to meet them, showing that the benchmark’s expectations are achievable and that practical pathways already exist.

Unmeasured dependencies hide real business risk

Where dependencies are quantified, companies are better positioned to anticipate disruption, prioritise investment, and build resilience. And in a world of tightening ecological constraints, this capability is becoming increasingly central to long-term competitiveness. And yet, only 14% of companies quantify and disclose their dependence on nature. Part of the explanation lies in how companies still approach materiality. Traditional financial materiality focuses on issues that affect revenues, costs, or asset values. Double materiality adds a second perspective, asking companies to identify their most significant impacts on people and the environment, regardless of whether those impacts have immediate financial consequences. In practice, many companies still treat these perspectives as separate, despite growing evidence that they converge over time.

Recent experience illustrates this clearly. During the 2020–2021 drought in Taiwan, the world’s largest chip manufacturer, TSMC, was forced to quickly secure alternative water supplies and accelerate investment in water recycling to keep fabrication plants operating. Water scarcity, long framed as an environmental issue, not only became a direct operational and cost challenge for the company, but also a major contributor to a global chip shortage that lasted multiple years. Similarly, a 2019 tailings dam collapse in one of Vale’s mines in Brazil resulted in hundreds of deaths, widespread environmental damage, and the shutdown of multiple operations. The consequences included billions of dollars in fines, compensation payments, asset write-downs, and long-term regulatory constraints. These examples make clear that environmental risks are business risks, and when nature is neglected, it is felt on the balance sheet.

This also helps explain what might otherwise seem paradoxical: some companies in traditionally high-risk sectors, such as mining, perform relatively well in the benchmark. These are often the companies, that have faced intense public or media scrutiny for poor environmental practices and are now investing very actively in improved disclosure, measurement, and governance. High exposure to nature-related risk, combined with reputational and regulatory pressure, has pushed them to act. By contrast, many other companies continue to underestimate the strategic importance of understanding and managing their dependencies on nature, until those risks are forced into view.

Holding the line on nature

The 2026 Nature Benchmark makes one thing clear: overall corporate performance on nature remains far below what is required, even as a subset of companies and regions demonstrate that stronger performance is achievable. The constraint is no longer feasibility, but resolve.
Backsliding is a real and present risk. It is already visible in the US, and debates in the EU around the omnibus, simplification, and reducing reporting burdens risk creating a complacency trap that erodes hard-won progress. If pressure weakens, so too will momentum. History shows that corporate behaviour does not shift at scale through voluntary action alone, it shifts when expectations are clear, scrutiny is sustained, and accountability is unavoidable. This is precisely why the work of the World Benchmarking Alliance matters. By independently measuring, comparing, and publicly ranking company performance, WBA helps keep nature firmly on the business agenda and ensures that progress, once made, is not quietly undone.