Whether you operate in retail, food and beverage, or textile and fashion, the majority of the environmental footprint in most sectors is not within a company's own operations. Instead, it lies in the supply chain, where nature-related impacts are embedded in the materials used — cotton spun into fabric, soy to feed cattle, or wood for construction materials. Developing an effective and robust materials strategy is essential for companies to achieve their climate goals.
Proactively considering nature-related impacts and risks during the early stages of strategy development yields many benefits, preparing your company for the challenges of the upcoming decade of nature. In this article, we will dive deeper into the importance of including nature in your thinking and provide seven practical steps to start building a holistic environmental materials strategy.
The first step is mapping out the ways your materials negatively impact nature and biodiversity. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) identifies five direct drivers through which a company's activities can exert pressure on nature and biodiversity; climate change is just one of them. Strictly focusing on carbon is a one-dimensional perspective; other drivers of biodiversity loss to consider are land and water use change, pollution, direct exploitation of natural resources, and invasive species.
Yet expanding environmental indicators beyond carbon is insufficient. For nature and biodiversity, it is imperative to understand the local conditions where pressures are released. Does your company use water from a region with a dry or humid climate? Is it operating in an area of high or low biodiversity importance? Answers to such questions provide a nuanced understanding of your company's relationship with nature, enabling a more comprehensive and sustainable approach to environmental impact assessment.
While climate change remains the dominant sustainability issue, policymakers, investors, and scientists believe that the looming nature and biodiversity crisis may have an even greater impact on our global economy and human well-being. If you look at the planetary boundaries, we've exceeded the safe limits for biodiversity, nitrogen, and phosphorus more than we have for climate change — a clear signal that nature and biodiversity must be part of every sustainability strategy.
When transitioning to biobased materials for a lower carbon footprint, companies need to be cautious. While these materials can help reduce carbon emissions, it's important to recognize that they may have other impacts. The processes involved in cultivating and extracting biobased materials, like those from crops or organic sources, can lead to habitat disruption, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. Therefore, it's crucial to be thoughtful when shifting to biobased materials, and avoid burden shifting by considering the wider ecological effects to ensure sustainable and well-informed material selection decisions. Alternatively, you can also identify synergies by improving both your climate and your nature footprint.
With upcoming regulations and new voluntary frameworks on nature and biodiversity such as CSRD, SBTN, and TNFD, it is advisable to include a nature focus early on. By doing so, businesses can proactively align with forthcoming requirements, fostering a more sustainable and compliant approach. This ensures companies are well-prepared for evolving regulatory landscapes, ultimately contributing to a more responsible and resilient business model.
Steps 2 and 3 are often where sustainability teams get stuck — gathering the right geospatial data and running the impact calculations is time-intensive. Spirefly's nature assessment tool automates both, so you can move from sourcing data to actionable priorities without months of manual work.
.jpeg)
