For years, calculating your carbon footprint was good enough. But if you only look at carbon, you’re looking at less than half the picture and missing out on opportunities and risks. An increasing number of companies are widening their environmental focus. Here are three good reasons why.
Climate and nature are deeply connected. They feed into each other constantly. Nature is the largest carbon sink we have. Degrading landscapes and clearing forests releases vast amounts of stored carbon. Deforestation and land degradation are responsible for ~10% of our global emissions.
On the flip side, restoring soil health on farmland stores more carbon, holds more water, and cuts the need for synthetic inputs. A study across 78 farms in 10 countries found that regenerative farmers used 62% less synthetic nitrogen and 76% fewer pesticides, at comparable yields.
When you map carbon and nature together, you find actions that solve both. When you keep them separate, you risk fixing one while making the other worse.
Carbon risk feels quantifiable. Tonnes, energy costs, emission factors. Nature risk can feel more fuzzy. But for many mid-sized companies it’s more immediate.
If your supply chain runs on agricultural raw materials, you depend on pollinators, healthy soil, and stable water. A 2025 study in Nature Communications modelled what wild pollinator collapse would do to European agriculture: 7.8% drop in crop yields, €34.4 billion in welfare losses. For a food company sourcing fruit, cocoa, or vegetables, that’s not an abstraction.
Water stress is similar. The VSME standard already asks companies to report water withdrawal from high-stress areas. Have you checked whether your key suppliers sit in those regions? In the Netherlands, nitrogen-related nature damage costs an estimated €14.6 billion per year. Nearly 1 in 5 Dutch businesses say their survival is at risk from it.
The CSRD Omnibus removed most mid-sized companies from mandatory reporting. But the pressure to act on nature didn’t disappear. Commercial channels are picking up. Here are a few examples.
Customers
CDP now runs a single integrated questionnaire covering climate, forests, water, and biodiversity. About 45,000 suppliers received requests in 2025. No response means an F score, visible to the customer who asked. EcoVadis scores biodiversity as one of 21 criteria, next to many other nature-related topics including water and pollution. If it’s activated for your industry and you have nothing to show, your Environment score drops. In some procurement processes, EcoVadis counts for 30% of the vendor evaluation.
Banks
ABN AMRO includes biodiversity in its CASY assessment for all corporate loans above €1 million. Their head of commercial clients has been blunt about it: sharing this information is no longer optional. Rabobank found 85% of its covered lending depends on ecosystem services and now ties interest rates to sustainability performance.
Regulation
And there’s regulation too. The EUDR doesn’t care about company size — if you import coffee, cocoa, leather, rubber, soy, or wood products into the EU, you need plot-level traceability by December 2026. ISO 14001:2026 adds biodiversity to environmental management systems for the first time.
Here’s the thing most people overlook: the data you need for nature risk assessment overlaps heavily with what you’re already collecting for Scope 3. Your supply chain mapping tells you where materials come from. Overlaying that geography with biodiversity or water stress data is a relatively small additional step.
The cost of doing both together is far lower than doing them sequentially, and the companies that move now won’t have to retrofit later.
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