We bring the right technology, together with the right people, to equip you with the insights you need to understand and manage your nature risks and opportunities. Our nature analytics services, powered by Natural Capital Research (Natcap), use granular geospatial datasets to evaluate and assess your organisation’s interface with nature. Our analysis and interpretation helps organisations to make informed strategic decisions about their interactions with nature, empowering them to transition to nature positive business models.
Centre for Nature Positive Business
Our Centre for Nature Positive Business team brings together environmental scientists and data specialists to provide our clients with a robust and efficient approach to understanding their interface with nature. With over 1,000 nature specialists around the globe, our mission is to support clients with taking action to reduce impacts and manage risks in the changing natural environment. Our reporting professionals further support clients to use our analysis to comply and respond to a multitude of emerging regulatory reporting frameworks including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
Why should organisations understand their relationship with nature?
Risk and impact management
Organisations need to assess their impacts and dependencies on nature to properly understand the associated business risks and opportunities. This can help you to strengthen your business resilience to environmental shocks whilst contributing towards halting and reversing biodiversity loss.
Value creation and protection
With a clear understanding of your relationship with nature, you will be in a better position to set targets and take action. A nature-positive business strategy aligned with the criteria in the Nature Strategy Handbook shows how you are taking meaningful action in the most impactful areas for your organisation.
Reporting and regulation
Mandatory requirements such as CSRD and EUDR and voluntary best-practice frameworks such as TNFD all require assessment, analysis and action on nature.
What does working with us on nature analytics look like?
Our nature analytics service, powered by Natcap, combines company information with credible geospatial datasets and additional analysis to provide organisations with the insights they need to understand and respond to nature-related impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities. We support organisations using a modular approach which maps to the Locate, Evaluate, Assess and Prepare (LEAP) process recommended by the TNFD and the CSRD.
Locate
An organisation’s impacts and dependencies on nature are highly location-specific. The first step in understanding your interface with nature is identifying the sites and inputs which should be prioritised for location-based analysis. This includes sites located in areas which are of:
- Importance for biodiversity, including species;
- High ecosystem integrity;
- Rapid decline in ecosystem integrity;
- High physical water risks;
- Importance for ecosystem service provision, including benefits to Indigenous Peoples, Local Communities and stakeholders.
Both the CSRD regulation (under ESRS E4) and the TNFD framework require organisations to perform a Biodiversity Sensitive Area (BSA) assessment as part of this locate phase. Our data-driven approach, powered by Natcap’s metrics, enables us to assess how your locations interface with sensitive areas. Location-based analysis can be time and resource intensive, so we use a rigorous data-driven process to enable you to prioritise locations for further evaluation of impacts and dependencies.
Evaluate
The next step is to identify, measure and value your nature-related impacts and dependencies to provide a clear picture of how your organisation interacts with nature. Impacts occur when you cause, or contribute to, a positive or negative change to the state of natural capital. Dependencies exist where business functions rely on specific ecosystem services.
Impacts: We can support you to identify and measure your impacts through assessing how your value chain interfaces with nature. Impacts are either negative (for example, the pollution of a nearby water course) or positive (for example, the restoration of previously degraded land). Using both measured and modelled impact driver metrics (for example, land use change, or air pollution) we can help you understand the resulting changes in the state of nature associated with the processes within your value chain, as well as how these overlap with sensitive locations.
Dependencies: Many organisations are at an early stage of understanding how their value chain is dependent on ecosystem services. For example, companies which require agricultural commodities may require pollination services in their supply chain, whilst manufacturing facilities may require water purification and supply services. By combining leading ecosystem service datasets with business process analysis we can help you identify and assess your dependencies on nature.
Our approach to impact and dependency analysis is powered by Natcap’s data and research capabilities, and will provide you with the information needed to prioritise the locations and commodities where dependencies are highest, and/or at highest risk.
Assess
It is critical to understand the likelihood and magnitude of nature risks and opportunities, in order to be able to prioritise and manage them effectively.
Risks are potential threats to your organisation, and could translate into operational and financial effects. These could be linked to dependencies (for example, a decline in crop yields as a result of a decrease in pollinator numbers) or to impacts (for example, fines for contravening pollution regulation). By assessing the current state of these risks as well as how these risks might play out in the future, we can empower you to act preemptively to manage and reduce them.
Opportunities arise for organisations that are seeking to generate positive outcomes for nature and themselves. These may include positive impacts on nature, or the mitigation of negative impacts on nature, and we can help you identify opportunity areas which can have both business and environmental benefits. For example, reducing costs by transitioning to more efficient processes which require fewer natural resources.
We can support you with identifying which risks and opportunities are relevant for you, and can advise on how these can be monitored and integrated into existing enterprise risk management processes. We also use scenario analysis to further explore how risks and opportunities may develop in the future, and assess the potential financial impacts you could be exposed to.
Prepare
Organisations that can understand and assess their dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities should look to identify appropriate target areas for action, as well as metrics and KPIs to ensure progress is monitored.
In light of the increasing reporting requirements regarding nature, many organisations are being required to explain their interface with nature to their stakeholders - whether that be their customers, investors, or internally. We can support you with distilling analysis into disclosures, as well as advising on target areas and monitoring strategies.
We can also support you to integrate nature into your business processes by developing a nature strategy, in line with the Nature Strategy Handbook.
We understand that good quality data is essential to effectively analyse your organisation’s relationship with nature, which is why we are collaborating with Natcap. Their geospatial nature intelligence platform fuses a range of public, private and proprietary data sources together and applies science-based methodologies to provide our clients with the insights they need on nature.
Contact us
Director of Climate and Nature Strategy, PwC United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)7718 864854
Ben Matthews
PwC Sustainability Senior Manager, Climate and Nature, PwC United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)7956 661333
