Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures

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•  Corporate nature-related issues may ultimately appear in strategies, risk registers and disclosures.

• But the underlying relationships exist in real landscapes.

• An asset beside a wetland network has a different ecological context from one surrounded by intensively managed agricultural land. Infrastructure crossing fragmented habitat raises different questions from an activity located within a well-connected ecological network.

• Understanding nature-related issues therefore requires understanding where activities interact with nature and what is happening around them.

• That emphasis on location is directly relevant to TNFD, whose recommendations include disclosure of priority locations and whose LEAP approach begins by locating an organisation's interface with nature.

• Knowing where an asset is located is only the beginning.

• TerraViso can bring together environmental and ecological evidence around a location to build a richer picture of the surrounding landscape.

• Habitats, landscape structure, connectivity, fragmentation, environmental characteristics and evidence of change can all contribute to understanding the ecological context in which an organisation operates.

• Instead of seeing an asset simply as a point on a map, TerraViso helps investigate the landscape within which it sits.

• TNFD's LEAP approach provides organisations with a structured way to identify and assess nature-related issues through four phases:

Locate — Evaluate — Assess — Prepare. 

• TerraViso can provide spatial and ecological evidence relevant to that process.

• Understand where assets and activities interact with nature and investigate the ecological context around those locations.

• Build evidence about habitats, environmental characteristics, landscape condition and ecological relationships that can contribute to understanding dependencies and impacts.

• Provide spatial evidence and landscape context that can inform wider organisational assessment of nature-related risks and opportunities.

• Maintain consistent and traceable landscape evidence that can contribute to decision-making, monitoring and reporting.

TerraViso supports the evidence. The organisation determines what that evidence means for its dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities.

• Nature-related context cannot always be understood simply by measuring the distance between an asset and a protected area, habitat or environmental feature.

• Ecological relationships extend through landscapes.

• Watercourses connect places. Habitat networks cross ownership boundaries. Fragmentation can influence ecological resilience. Changes occurring beyond an immediate site may alter the environmental system within which an organisation operates.

• TerraViso Ecological Intelligence can help investigate those wider relationships.

• A map provides a picture of a landscape at a particular moment.

• Nature-related context can change.

• Habitats develop or decline. Land management changes. 

• Development occurs. Restoration takes place. Ecological networks can strengthen or become increasingly fragmented.

• Maintaining consistent evidence through time creates the potential to understand not only where an organisation interacts with nature, but how that landscape context is changing.

• TNFD's recommendations extend well beyond environmental mapping. They cover governance, strategy, risk and impact management, and metrics and targets. 

• TerraViso does not attempt to replace those organisational processes.

• Its role is to strengthen one important part of the evidence foundation: understanding nature in the context of location and landscape.

• That evidence can then contribute alongside financial, operational, supply-chain and other information to a wider TNFD assessment.