Let Accenture's Nature.VC help you get started on your nature journey

Naresh Bhansali, Swasti Saraogi, Siddharth Gupta, with contributions from Wesley Spindler, Barnabas Harrison, Akshay Kasera

A healthy and functioning natural world is not just essential for the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants, but also underpins a thriving global economy. Human-induced nature and biodiversity degradation now poses a significant risk to businesses and society at large, from disrupted supply chains and resource shortages to increased operational costs and reputational damage. In response to these crises, the nature agenda has started gaining global momentum amongst corporates, driven by stricter regulations (e.g., the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive [CSRD] and the EU Deforestation Regulation), rising investor demands (e.g., the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge, Nature Action 100), and ongoing shifts in consumer choices (e.g., demand for sustainable products). Therefore, to sustain continued growth and competitiveness, businesses need to assess the value of natural capital across their entire value chain. However, conducting an end-to-end nature assessment across a business' entire global footprint, especially its complex and often opaque n-tier supply chain, can be a daunting task due to limited data availability and insufficient granularity.

This is where Accenture’s Nature.ValueChain (Nature.VC) comes in – this is designed to help businesses quickly create a global map of their direct operations’ and supply chains’ sites, identify those sites’ interactions with nature, and prioritize sites where those interactions are greatest and require further evaluation. For businesses embarking on their nature journey, Nature.VC enables informed decisions to be made, and the rapidly evolving regulatory landscape to be navigated more easily.

What obstacles do businesses face when using nature-related risk management and disclosure frameworks?

In September 2023, we published an article delineating the key aspects that should be considered?when conducting a comprehensive assessment of nature-related risks and opportunities using the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) LEAP (Locate, Evaluate, Assess, and Prepare) methodology, and how companies are increasingly subject to emerging nature-related regulations and voluntary disclosures globally. Businesses are therefore looking to implement strategies, processes, solutions and monitoring frameworks that reduce their negative impacts on nature and mitigate business exposure.

On the other hand, many factors such as non-standardized techniques of measurement, outdated datasets and lack of robust spatial data act as bottlenecks to an extensive nature assessment. The majority of businesses today do not have clear, reliable data to measure and monitor their nature-related impacts and dependencies, especially across their supply chain – where their impacts and dependencies are often greatest. Evaluation of impacts and dependencies is a complex task as multiple factors need to be accounted for; however, nature-related data and tools are often not only limited in granularity and breadth of insights, but also in their application for non-technical users.

The opportunity cost of this data deficit is equally staggering – efforts get scattered, resources are wasted on marginal initiatives and genuine progress stagnates. Businesses lack the insights to implement effective nature conservation measures, jeopardizing financial performance, regulatory compliance, and reputation. To navigate this, businesses must actively seek and embrace reliable and granular data, to accurately measure their nature-related impacts and dependencies.

How can we address the issue and what is Nature.ValueChain?

Accenture’s strategic, technology-based, and data-driven solution suite positions us well to guide organizations in their nature journey. Nature.VC, our brainchild designed to effortlessly weave nature into business strategies, is fueled by diligently selected geospatial data and top-tier technology to empower our clients to identify and prioritize locations across their direct operations and upstream supply chain, where the business likely has high nature-related impacts and dependencies. These areas are likely to be the source of significant exposure to their business and therefore, by scoping these interfaces with nature, Nature.VC helps businesses to rapidly focus their nature assessments onto the most important locations.

Having reviewed over 100+ different nature-related tools and datasets available today, we believe Nature.VC stands out due to its n-tier analysis capability, which enables a business to rapidly identify and geo-locate suppliers beyond tier-1, all the way back to the origin of its raw materials at tier-n. Tier-n supplier mapping is essential in nature-related assessments, as the lower-tier industries (e.g., extraction of natural resources such as mining and timber) often have higher negative impacts on nature. Yet very few organizations can claim to have visibility of their suppliers beyond tier-1. Only about 28% companies have visibility of their tier-2 suppliers. The number is even lower, at only 7%, for tier-3 suppliers (EcoVadis, 2021). Having identified tier-n suppliers and their geographic locations, Nature.VC then helps businesses to understand the interactions with nature at those locations, and subsequently prioritize those for further assessment, based on several parameters.

What does it mean for you and how will Nature.VC help?

Nature.VC serves as a powerful ally for businesses to rapidly get started on their nature journeys, using a three-tiered approach:

1. Business footprint and n-tier analysis: The tool leverages machine learning based location filtering to map locations of direct operations and supply chain sites, drawing on diverse external data sources such as firmographics, trade flows and geo-coordinates to offer extensive insights into organizations’ n-tier supply chains.

2. Interactions with nature: The tool then identifies the Key Biodiversity Areas, threatened species, Protected Areas and water stress zones that the locations interface with globally (as aligned with recommendations in CSRD, TNFD and CDP guidance).

3. Priority business locations: Thirdly, Nature.VC categorizes business activities across the global value chain into four priority levels based on both nature and business considerations. On the nature front, prioritization is based on proximity to high integrity ecosystems, important biodiversity areas, elevated water-stress levels and high potential impacts on nature (as aligned with recommendations from CSRD, TNFD and Science-based Targets for Nature (SBTN)). On the business front, it allows integration of the strategic and financial importance of different locations, such as share of revenue, procurement expenditure and high supplier dependency. This dual prioritization approach enables businesses to target their efforts on critical areas with the most significant potential impacts and dependencies on nature.

The outcomes from Nature.VC serve as a stepping-stone for a focused and structured evaluation of impacts and dependencies on nature, and the corresponding business risks and opportunities - a critical prerequisite for informed corporate and investment decision-making. Our tool also helps businesses to ready themselves for disclosing in line with the wide array of nature-related regulations and disclosure frameworks, including the CSRD, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and Science-based Targets for Nature (SBTN). Essentially, with global action on nature surging, fueled by tightening regulations, increasing investor pressure and an ongoing consumer shift towards sustainability, Nature.VC cuts through the complexity and equips businesses to meet rising stakeholder expectations for action on nature action.

How to get started?

If you would like to know more about how Nature.VC can help your business tackle its greatest nature-related impacts and realize a competitive advantage from doing so, please do get in touch with us. Our global team of seasoned professionals are well equipped to assist you on your nature journey and can even tailor the tool's functionalities to your specific needs.

Interested to know more about the topic? Check out our other articles by Barnabas Harrison on what we learned in a detailed TNFD pilot and by Louise Quarrel on what to look out for in TNFD’s final framework released last September.