What is TNFD?
As an official TNFD adopter, we explore what the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures is, and how we can support your organisation in applying the disclosure recommendations and guidance.
The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) is a market-led, science-based global initiative whose recommendations and guidance help companies understand, manage and disclose their nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities.
Integrating nature into business: Building resilience for a sustainable society
Nature corporate disclosures involve many different types of reporting to understand how nature is essential for businesses. This includes reporting standards such as the TNFD, Science Based Targets Network (SBTN), Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) 101, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) and more.
Following four beta versions of their guidance and extensive stakeholder engagement, the TNFD formally released their recommendations in September 2023. Since then, the guidance has expanded to include specific sectors, biomes, value chain activities and scenarios.
By keeping up to date with this guidance, we're able to support clients with their nature corporate disclosures. This support is broken down into three main steps: scoping, LEAP analysis, and disclosure.
Step 1 - Scoping
We begin with a scoping phase to truly understand your business: your priorities, operations, and strategic goals. This is where our partnership starts.
This is followed by a preliminary scan of your key direct operations and value chain to support a high-level materiality assessment, to identify your organisation's nature-related dependencies and impacts. We also assess the geographic footprint of your key business activities to highlight potential exposure to water-scarce regions and proximity to key biodiversity areas.
The initial scoping provides a clear, actionable foundation, enabling you to make informed decisions about where to focus ahead of the second step - the LEAP analysis.
Step 2 - LEAP analysis
The LEAP approach provides a methodical framework to determine the nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities for your key operational and value chain activities. There are four phases for this analysis: Locate, Evaluate, Assess and Prepare.
Locate - The Locate phase maps your business footprint as precisely as possible and identifies activities interacting with nature-sensitive areas. This is the first step towards determining your nature-related risks and opportunities.
Evaluate - The Evaluate phase involves a deep dive into your organisation's nature-related dependencies and impacts to establish the extent to which your specific operational and value chain business activities depend on and impact nature. As part of this phase, the nature-related impacts and dependencies identified are also used to produce a materiality assessment. This is then used in the 'Assess' phase.
Assess - During the Assess phase, we identify the most material risks and opportunities for both your business and for nature. This draws together insights from the previous phases, including the state of nature, your dependencies and impacts materiality assessment, as well as our understanding of your business priorities. By integrating these, we can calculate the nature-related risks and identify opportunities for your business.
Prepare - The Prepare phase brings together the insights from the previous phases to present and report your nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities, in line with TNFD guidance. We support you to disclose under the four TNFD pillars of Governance, Strategy, Risk and impact management, and Metrics and targets, in a transparent and meaningful way to help set relevant science-based targets.
Step 3 - Disclosure
The TNFD has 14 core disclosures that build upon its four pillars. As well as supporting you to complete your organisation's TNFD report, we also provide expertise beyond disclosure, enabling you to make practical, relevant and actionable decisions to achieve more climate resilience and nature positive outcomes for business, society and people.
We are a TNFD adopter, meaning we will disclose our nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities for the 2024-2025 financial year.
