Corporate Needs for Nature Tech: Which Areas Are Well Served? Where Are the Gaps and Barriers?
Session Description
This 90-minute working session, hosted by Biodiversify and the Nature and Biodiversity Peer Group, brought corporates, service providers, investors, and researchers together to unpack a question that keeps coming up across the sector: is nature technology actually helping businesses make decisions, or is the pace of data and tooling outstripping organisations' ability to use it? The session opened with framing from the hosts on where corporate nature tech is well served and where it isn't, then moved into small-group discussion built around a series of guiding questions, with report-backs to the wider room throughout.
Speakers
Harriet Branson, Senior Consultant, Biodiversify
Melissa Miners, Nature and Biodiversity Peer Group
Maria Clara Iruzun Martins, Consultant, Biodiversify
Watch the Session Recording
Key Takeaways
Corporate engagement with nature is growing fast: recent EY analysis puts ninety-three percent of companies now mentioning nature-related topics in their reporting, and over two billion dollars was invested into nature tech tools, platforms, and datasets in 2024 alone.
The Nature and Biodiversity Peer Group, founded two years ago, is a practitioner-led group of three to four hundred members who meet every six weeks to work through the tactical, day-to-day challenges of running nature programmes inside a business, not the high-level corporate strategy.
Using the assess-and-commit stages of the ACT-D framework, the group's most recurring challenges are: building internal capacity to understand nature impacts and dependencies, competing for resource against climate-mandated frameworks like TNFD, deciding which nature frameworks to formally adopt, and translating nature commitments into something commercially usable, like what a brand can safely put on pack.
Growth in corporate nature tech is being driven by external pressure (regulation, disclosure rules, investor scrutiny), a shift from "do no harm" to nature-positive strategy, and a rapid expansion in technical capability, from satellite monitoring to bioacoustics and eDNA. But organisational readiness to interpret and act on that data isn't keeping pace.
Areas considered relatively well served: forest and deforestation monitoring via satellite, site-level risk screening tools like IBAT, the WWF Risk Filter, and WRI Aqueduct, and a growing layer of disclosure guidance through frameworks like SBTN and TNFD.
Clear gaps remain in freshwater and marine monitoring, which lag well behind forest-related tools, plus ongoing friction integrating site-level and value-chain data across systems, and a persistent gap in translating insights into action. A recurring line from the discussion: "we have too much data, but too little insight."
Where nature tech has worked well, it's come down to a "golden triangle" of cross-functional buy-in, budget, and technical capability to interpret the data, alongside a push for more consistent baselines or a shared "North Star" dashboard businesses could rally around.
In breakout discussion, attendees flagged the difficulty of translating sophisticated data into something a client can absorb in an elevator ride, and a structural problem where the people meant to act on nature data often don't hold the decision-making power to do so.
Another theme was the challenge of building a measurement rubric that works at both enterprise and local scale, and solving an enterprise-wide problem without losing the value of highly localised, siloed tools.
One framing device offered during the session was a two-by-two of disclosure/reporting metrics (public, standardised, but often underused once built) against performance management metrics (private, proprietary, and poorly served by existing guidance), crossed with a supply-chain lens versus a landscape-level lens.
On whether "nature outcomes" needs a shared definition, the room split: some argued outcomes are too project- and landscape-specific to standardise, while others pointed to the Global Biodiversity Framework's COP targets and the EU's Nature Restoration Law as proof that shared definitions already exist and are needed to create binding commitments.
A perspective from the corporate side argued for pragmatism over abstraction: talking about "nature outcomes" loses a boardroom in seconds, but framing the same issue as raw material risk, or as a competitive opportunity, gets attention and budget.
Others described simplifying externally for the same reason, boiling complex, multi-year ecological work down to a single memorable line for corporate partners, because over-explaining loses the audience's attention.
One suggestion was to disaggregate "nature" into specific, business-relevant outcomes (water, land use, risk mitigation) rather than chasing one overarching metric.
Closing pitches included a proposal for a tool connecting environmental impact assessments, TNFD LEAP results, and climate and nature scenario analysis into something boardroom-relevant, and a pitch for a community-led "hack space," where indigenous and frontline communities in Brazil build their own low-cost sensors (bioacoustic, seismic) to track what actually matters to them, like mercury levels they can take to court, in a form that can also be shared with investors.
The session closed on two themes: there's no single metric that covers everything nature-related, and while there's no single shared definition of "nature outcomes," high-level global and regional commitments still give businesses useful scaffolding to build their own, more specific, versions of it.
