Most companies have gotten reasonably comfortable talking about carbon. Scope 1, 2, and even Scope 3 emissions have standardized methodologies, familiar units (tCO2e), and a decade of tooling built around them. Nature is a different beast entirely — and it’s quickly becoming the next frontier companies can’t avoid.

The core challenge is this: carbon is a single, fungible metric. A ton of CO2 emitted in Brazil has the same climate effect as a ton emitted in Germany. Nature doesn’t work that way. A liter of water withdrawn in a water-stressed basin in Kenya is not equivalent to a liter withdrawn in a rain-soaked region of Scotland. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, soil degradation, and water stress are all local, contextual, and multidimensional — which is exactly what makes them so hard to measure at scale, especially across a sprawling, multi-tier supply chain you don’t fully see into.

Most companies’ direct footprint is the easy part to measure — you own the buildings, meter the electricity, and count the trucks. The supply chain is where nature impact actually concentrates, and where visibility drops off a cliff. No single supplier’s nature risk looks large enough to matter on its own. The real exposure comes from how those risks aggregate across the whole portfolio of sourcing relationships — which is much harder to see and much easier to underestimate.

In addition, these are the current trends that are pushing companies to take it seriously:

• Regulation is catching up: The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and emerging rules under CSDDD all require companies to understand and disclose nature-related impacts across their value chains — not just their own operations.
• Voluntary frameworks are maturing fast: The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) now has hundreds of companies aligning with its recommendations, and the ISSB is working toward its own nature-related disclosure standards. The Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) has published methodology for companies to set actual science-based targets for nature, not just carbon.
• The data gap is real and well-documented: Early CSRD reporting cycles have shown that a large share of companies still lack adequate systems for measuring biodiversity impact, which creates both audit risk and reputational risk.
• Investors and customers are asking: Nature risk is increasingly framed not as a compliance checkbox but as a genuine business resilience issue — droughts, pollinator collapse, and ecosystem degradation are supply disruption risks in their own right.

Measuring nature impact in the supply chain is genuinely harder than measuring carbon: it’s local rather than global, multidimensional rather than singular, and concentrated in parts of the value chain companies often can’t see clearly. But “hard to measure perfectly” isn’t the same as “can’t be measured usefully.” Starting with materiality screening, focusing on high-impact commodities, and using a structured assessment framework gets a company from zero visibility to genuinely useful insight — well before every metric is standardized and every regulation is finalized.

The companies treating this as strategic groundwork now, rather than a future compliance problem, are the ones who’ll have real answers when stakeholders start asking harder questions.