Nature as a blind spot? How to stop your business underestimating its reliance on nature

Too few businesses recognise that their business is contingent on nature – even when they report experiencing costs from climate disruption. 

Where does this disconnect come from? Is nature truly a blind spot for businesses? And how can CSOs convince decision makers to see healthy ecosystems as a prerequisite for business success?

How much do businesses really depend on nature?

All businesses rely on nature. As the recent IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment puts it, “businesses depend on biodiversity, but business actions continue to drive declines in biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.” And more starkly, “the resulting degradation of ecosystems generates physical risks for the very businesses and economic systems that depend on them.” 

Even the most service-based and online-only businesses rely on nature-dependent infrastructure, global supply networks, equipment, products and raw materials, food and water security – and so on.

But very few realise that: even when asked directly, business leaders do not appear to be placing a particularly high importance on the impacts and risks of ecosystem degradation and collapse for their business success. The message of the IPBES report is not yet cutting through.

Businesses are starting to feel climate impacts on the balance sheet…

According to CDP, companies disclosed nearly US$3 billion in climate losses in 2025 alone, and expect US$898 billion in future financial impacts.

Looking ahead, companies expect US$528 billion of losses due to flooding, US$161 billion from cyclones, and US$86 billion from heavy rain, with nearly half (48%) of extreme weather risks expected to materialise in the next two years. 

It’s clear that the impacts of climate change and nature breakdown are starting to feature on the balance sheet for many businesses – they are starting to cost businesses money.

…but are they truly connecting the dots?

And yet, it seems that safeguarding and investing in nature is still not being directly connected with those costs.

This is a challenge for CSOs looking to make the case for assessing impacts on nature and investing in nature restoration – whether it be within our outside of the value chain.

Because whilst the impacts are becoming visible in financial terms, decision-makers are still unclear on how to use investment in nature as a lever to secure business resilience to future shocks.

How leading businesses are starting to account for nature

Educating decision-makers on intrinsic climate and nature links

One reason the connection between financial impacts on the business and nature risks is difficult to demonstrate is because businesses are used to compartmentalising ‘climate’ and ‘nature’ as if they are distinct. And it’s not just businesses: this is also reflected in our international frameworks and institutions, hence we have both a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and a UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD).

Of course, this is a category error: climate and nature are deeply interwoven concepts, and the climate and nature crises each produce rippling feedbacks which affect the other. 

Rather than treating nature as a separate, distinct category from climate strategy, CSOs can position it as part of the same programme: an overarching transition plan to manage climate and nature risks that will assure business continuity and the best chance of commercial success in the future.

This best practice has also been shown to unlock billions of dollars of new opportunities.

Assessing and disclosing nature impacts under TNFD

The framework of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) provides a way to assess and disclose how nature loss creates financially-material business risks. 

TNFD pushes businesses to identify not only their impacts on ecosystems, but their dependencies on them. For many organisations, the exercise exposes risks that have historically been left out of traditional financial reporting, bringing them inside the scope of the risk assessment: production sites found to be in water-stressed regions, exposures to climate-sensitive agricultural supply chains; rising insurance costs linked to flood risks, and so on.

Using nature investment to boost the resilience of key sites

Once a business has an idea of the natural risks its sites and operations are exposed to, it is easier to then make the business case to do something about it.

Some companies are now investing directly in flood resilience, urban cooling, watershed restoration, regenerative agriculture, and biodiversity enhancement around their critical assets. As one example, in our work at Ecologi we’ve helped giffgaff to fund (and participate in) peatland restoration in the Peak District, helping to protect vital wetland ecosystems upstream of Manchester and Sheffield.

In this way, nature restoration can be framed as reducing future disruption (to flooding for example) as well as exposure to high insurance premiums, or service downtime.

Redirecting funds from other budget lines into nature

Another challenge can be unlocking the internal budget for nature.

Rather than treating restoration projects purely as CSR or ESG (typically which have limited budgets), increasingly, forward-thinking businesses are finding ways to collaborate with other departments to spread the investment that benefits the whole business.

We’ve seen this with our Media in Service of Nature campaign, where a consortium of brands, agencies and media owners are pooling funds from advertising campaigns to funnel to nature restoration programmes across the UK. 

How CSOs can avoid underestimating nature

As climate impacts intensify and biodiversity continues to suffer, businesses will increasingly feel the costs, and in ways that are increasingly easy to spot on the balance sheet: through insurance premiums, supply chain disruption, economic volatility, infrastructure damage, and safeguarding employees – to name just a few. This is becoming apparent to businesses who are already reporting that these impacts are taking place.

The businesses that succeed in a changing climate in the coming years and decades will be those that stop viewing nature as external to the economy and start recognising it as the foundation beneath it.

For CSOs, the challenge is less about making the moral case for nature, and more about helping our organisations understand the direct, measurable financial consequences of continuing to undervalue it. The results from our recent survey prove that the businesses are grasping this – they just need some help to join the dots.

Ecologi’s annual Climate Commitments Survey report 2026 will be published on the Ecologi website in mid-June 2026 – we’ll explore the results in our next column.

Sam Jackson, Director of Climate Science and Impact at Ecologi

Ecologi is the UK's most trusted climate action platform for every step of your climate journey. Speak with one of their climate experts today at ecologi.com