Ask most companies outside agriculture, mining, or forestry whether nature is material to them, and the honest answer is usually “not really.” The evidence says otherwise. Nature dependence is distributed across the entire corporate value chain, not confined to sectors that obviously touch land and ecosystems, and it rarely shows up where people expect.

The World Economic Forum estimated that roughly $44 trillion of economic value generation, over half of global GDP, is moderately or highly dependent on nature. Construction, agriculture, and food are the obvious exposed sectors, but four value chains alone, food, infrastructure, fashion, and energy, account for roughly 90% of humanity’s biodiversity impact, meaning most of that exposure sits inside supply chains companies rarely map for this purpose.

Research separating dependence from impact found that service-oriented sectors like retail, consumer goods, and technology hardware carry meaningful nature dependence too, just channelled through supply chains rather than direct operations. A company can score low on every conventional environmental metric and still carry real nature dependence, because dependence and impact aren’t the same axis. You can be exposed to a risk you’re not causing.

Water makes the point most plainly, because there’s no sector exemption from needing it. Data centres need it for cooling, EV production depends on water-intensive mining, and office buildings need it for basic sanitation, alongside the obvious cases of farming and manufacturing. Virtually every organisation is connected to the water crisis in some way, whether through direct consumption or through a supply chain that depends on it.

This is what double materiality captures. TNFD and GRI frame nature exposure on two axes: financial materiality (whether ecosystem degradation threatens costs, supply, or asset values) and impact materiality (whether a company’s activities are degrading nature, whether or not that shows up on a balance sheet). The two often move together rather than cancelling out. Firms with greater nature dependence also tend to have a greater biodiversity footprint, a self-reinforcing cycle where operations depend on ecosystem services while degrading the same services they rely on.

Pharmaceuticals is a good example here. Globally, roughly half of all small-molecule drugs approved between 1981 and 2019 have been natural products, natural product derivatives, or close analogues. That’s a real, quantifiable dependency on biodiversity inside an industry nobody instinctively associates with nature risk.

The relationship also runs the other way productively. Wetlands regulate flood water, green infrastructure cuts urban heat, and mangroves and seagrass sequester carbon faster than terrestrial forests. Research into natural climate solutions found real mitigation potential specifically because those models included a biodiversity constraint, ruling out converting natural habitat or native grassland purely for carbon. Take biodiversity seriously as a constraint, and nature-based climate solutions don’t get weaker; they get better designed.

The clearest sign that nature materiality has moved beyond resource-intensive sectors is who’s reporting on it. Early TNFD reporters include AXA, GSK, Iberdrola, and UBS: an insurer, a pharma company, a utility, and a bank, none of them extractive industries. What they share is a loan book, underwriting portfolio, or investment portfolio that finances companies who do extract, so their exposure runs through what they fund rather than what they produce. 

Not every company needs the depth of assessment a mining company does, but “not material to us” should be a conclusion earned through an actual dependency and impact screen, not an assumption based on sector. Applying TNFD’s LEAP framework (locate, evaluate, assess, prepare) to a company’s actual supply chain and financing relationships, rather than just its own operations, is usually what surfaces exposure that a sector-based assumption misses entirely. This is no longer purely voluntary either: under the CSRD, in-scope companies must run a double materiality assessment covering ESRS E4 (biodiversity and ecosystems), meaning the screening question itself is becoming a compliance requirement rather than a purely voluntary exercise.