For six months, I lived with Emberá communities in the Darien region of Panama. Here, I saw the frightening pace at which Indigenous people, often dependent on the natural world, must adapt to deforestation and biodiversity loss.
For another six, I measured the Illecillewaet and Athabasca Glaciers in Canada. Here, I saw how glaciers – the main sources of fresh water in these parts of the world – are melting rapidly. There’s no denying that these research experiences impacted me. I returned having seen the natural world changing before my eyes.
Later, as I worked as a contributing author for the 2007 IPCC Good Practice Guidance for Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry report (part of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning IPCC), the gravity of the climate crisis struck me afresh. Here it was again in writing: All our futures are uncertain—all our emissions count.
But while glacial researchers and the Emberá people are facing up to the climate and nature crises, some people still seem to feel immune. I can’t help but notice an element of denial among businesses in the Global North.
Many corporates have not yet grasped that they put their supply chains, their operations, and their staff at risk when they fail to cut their polluting emissions. It has not sunk in that unless they take these crises seriously, they will, without a doubt, suffer deep financial damage.
A cornucopia of spatial data
While the risks are severe, I still find reasons to be hopeful. Spatial data – that which shows Earth’s landscapes and geographies – is now so advanced that we can plot forest carbon and land use changes with precision from space. For instance, lidar – a technology using a pulsed laser to measure distances – once so expensive, can now be affordably deployed to measure forests.
Now we have insights at our fingertips, I am on a mission: I want to see sustainability teams use spatial data to its fullest potential to avoid serious, climate-induced financial damage.
But what does this look like? Put simply, I don’t want to see corporate datasets recording year after year of business-as-usual emissions and nature loss. Instead, I want to empower Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs), Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs), and Risk Managers with convincing insights that will help them act and reduce the environmental impacts of their company’s activities and bring the Board along with them.
In protecting the planet, companies protect their own futures. By addressing the climate and nature impacts of their operations, they essentially increase their resilience.
Data for disclosures
Fortunately, accessing high-quality, spatial data has never been easier. Data providers, such as Chloris Geospatial, Planet and IBAT, provide accurate and detailed information on climate and nature metrics.
Where the challenge lies, however, is in bringing together this plethora of data and creating tailored insights. This is important to align with mandatory regulations such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), and to get ahead with the, for-now, voluntary Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) or simply to track progress against science-based targets in line with climate and nature science (SBTi, SBTN).
For sustainability and risk teams to report to these regulations and frameworks and track progress, they need to glean insights from these data without employing a small army of coders or harnessing deep geospatial expertise. But where to start?
LEAPing forward
When corporate leaders and compliance teams first engage with these challenges, it’s not surprising that they can feel lost in a minestrone of regulation. Simply writing the initialisms above is enough to prove my point!
Many start with TNFD because it is simple to follow and regulations (like CSRD’s European Sustainability Reporting Standard) explicitly make reference to it. This framework helps uncover the risks and opportunities present in their businesses and answer questions like: How will nature loss impact our bottom line? And what do investors expect from us?
Moreover, the TNFD developed an approach known as LEAP to help organisations assess their nature-related issues. Broken into four stages, LEAP guides sustainability teams to Locate, Evaluate, Assess, and Prepare to respond to nature-related risks and dependencies. Not only can it be used to report to CSRD, but those who are already deploying LEAP will be well-placed to progress tracking against SBTi and SBTN targets.
LEAP is the best place to start to identify, assess, and manage your nature-related issues. In terms of what you then disclose to investors and stakeholders, TNFD offers 14 "recommended disclosures" (Image 1).
The key to the TNFD’s recommended disclosures is effectively harnessing spatial data. To deliver on regulatory requirements, companies need to use a flexible, high-performance platform that simplifies the complexity of sustainability regulations and enables them to run specific risk and impact analyses at scale.
Using spatial data, such platforms allow companies to visualise where their activities threaten – or are dependent on – nature using interactive maps. In this way, spatial data can help mitigate risk by accurately showing the locations where a business’s value chain is most at risk.
Beyond compliance
However, reporting to the regulations is not enough to safeguard against financial damage. Unless companies actually reduce their nature risks and dependencies, they will find themselves financially vulnerable in the future.
Therefore, it is not enough to adopt a bare minimum approach. The world needs corporate leaders to work beyond the regulation and ask: ‘What can we do with this spatial data that will help us to halt and reverse nature loss?’
So, to every sustainability team, compliance or risk manager, I say: Invest the resources now to work with impact-driven spatial data platforms. Invest the time now to research how spatial data insights could help reduce your nature-based risks such as flood, fire and heatwaves.
With 2030 fast approaching, corporations will want to report clear improvements in their impacts on the natural world every single year. We simply don’t have time to use our spatial data to document business as usual. Only with clear, annual risk reduction will your business protect itself against future uncertainty and financial damage.
Dr. Genevieve Patenaude
Dr. Genevieve Patenaude is CEO and co-founder at Earth Blox. Previously an associate professor at the University of Edinburgh's School of Geosciences, she led international research projects on Earth Observation and big data, and was a contributing author to the Good Practice Guidance for Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Equipped with this experience, her mission is to enable positive action for the future of life on our shared planet through Earth Blox.