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Increasingly, corporate reporting on nature is being aligned to a new voluntary framework – the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). Since its publication in 2023, more than 700 financial institutions and corporates have signed up to adopt the reporting framework, covering $20trn in assets under management.
As it continues to shape how businesses engage with nature, there is a need to better align TNFD assessments with established environmental practices such as impact assessments during project development stages as well as during operational management of assets.
Indeed, existing impact assessments and operational management systems can provide important information and data for a TNFD-aligned assessment of impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities. In turn, a TNFD assessment, and any associated nature strategy, can also help to ensure that business decision-making around project developments and operations fully factors in relevant nature-related issues. Through aligning these approaches, local site- and asset-level data can be compiled to inform enterprise-level assessment and understanding, supporting better outcomes for businesses and nature.
The TNFD 2025 Status Report indicated that organisations are dedicating one or two full-time equivalent staff to voluntary TNFD reporting annually. This is a significant resource to dedicate to reporting alone.
One way to make this process more efficient, effective and joined-up is to incorporate existing environmental data from different stages of a business’s lifecycle – from project concept design to operation and decommissioning.
For built environment sectors such as urban development, and transport and infrastructure – as well as extractive industries – environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are common or routinely required by national legislation. Although EIAs and TNFD assessments differ in their purpose, scope and application, they share foundational principles that create opportunities for mutual reinforcement and integration.
Both aim to understand, reduce and manage human impacts on nature, using environmental data to inform decisions and guide action. Each follows a structured assessment process – identifying spatial sensitivities, drivers of change and affected environmental or nature-related factors, and prioritising them according to their importance.
This shared logic is especially evident in the ‘locate’ and ‘evaluate’ phases of the TNFD’s ‘locate, evaluate, assess, prepare’ (LEAP) approach – a recommended method to identify corporate-level impacts and dependencies on nature.
In our work, we are increasingly looking to use existing, quantitative EIAs and other relevant data held by a business to support a robust and consistent TNFD assessment. Specific ways to use EIA data or best practice in a TNFD assessment include:
1) Referring to national or international EIA practice to establish a comparable zone of influence for the spatial mapping of a business’s interface with nature
2) Using data directly from an EIA or an ecological impact assessment to understand the sensitivity of a species/habitat to specific impacts and to provide information on cumulative impacts
2) Involving ecologists, particularly in identifying and characterising nature-related impacts and dependencies.
During the operational stages of a business, data that is collected for an environmental management system (EMS) is equally valuable. For compliance purposes, businesses often gather site-level data for likely impacts (less so for dependencies) that will be highlighted in a materiality assessment or the ‘evaluate’ phase of a TNFD LEAP assessment. Commonly assessed metrics in addition to greenhouse gas emissions include water use and discharges, emission of air pollutants, waste generation, habitat restoration and ecological monitoring. Using this existing data can ensure that impact materiality is informed by quantitative site-level data and validated by the environmental managers who collect and interpret it.
When looking at risk, we have found that for any business with a systematic governance structure, nature-related risks can be incorporated into existing enterprise risk-management systems and classifications – enabling the results from the TNFD assessment to be aligned with existing business language and understanding around risk management. Using existing business mechanisms makes data accessible to business leaders and ensures that it is represented during strategic decision-making.
By maximising the use of existing processes and data, corporate-level assessments of nature-related risk using the TNFD framework can become more integrated, efficient and data-driven, and less burdensome for a business.
Just as EIAs, EMSs and risk-management systems can inform the TNFD assessment itself, the results can be used to guide how data is captured and enable it to be used for a broader purpose. There is a clear opportunity to pull together environmental systems and processes into a single, coherent data resource connected to a strategy that encompasses relevant, measurable targets and metrics – with environmental data providing monitoring of progress over time. Some companies are starting to build these systems internally or are using external tools to do so.
However, there are some challenges. Ecological data is often complex, localised and technical, making it difficult to convert into materiality assessments, simple key performance indicators or financial disclosures. Overcoming this requires stronger collaboration and mutual understanding between ecologists, sustainability professionals, industry experts and finance teams.
EIA data needs to be stored digitally in accessible, georeferenced and standardised formats. This ensures that data – which is costly to collect – can be reused effectively to inform corporate reporting and strategy. Leveraging digital platforms and artificial intelligence helps to automate data structuring, flag outdated data sets and ensure that ecological information remains current, usable and decision-ready over time.
Businesses are recognising the need for centralised reporting dashboards to enable them to collect all their monitoring data in a way that can be easily reported in the format required by sustainability frameworks such as the TNFD.
Existing environmental mechanisms can benefit from TNFD’s strategic framing, long-term perspective, emphasis on risk management and investor relevance. In turn, TNFD assessments can be strengthened by the rigour, field-based data and legal grounding of EIAs and EMSs. By bringing these processes and their data together in a systematic way, businesses can create greater value through more efficient, consistent, credible and impactful decision-making. This in turn will enable the day-to-day work of sustainability professionals to be targeted on action and creating business value from our relationship with nature.
Jenny Merriman MISEP CEnv is director (nature advisory) at WSP, and Margot Greenen PISEP is senior consultant and nature services coordinator at Arup
