What the Nature Strategy Accelerator Unlocks: Turning Nature Data into Strategic Advantage

The recent IPBES business and biodiversity assessment definitively states that the natural world underpins the whole economy with all sectors directly or indirectly dependent on the goods and service nature provides. However, many companies struggle to make the case for strategic action to halt nature loss. Nature assessments can reveal where a company interacts with and depends upon nature, but on their own they rarely change how the business invests, sources, or grows. 

The 2025 cohort included more than 20 member companies that had already completed a “LEAP-type” assessment, getting to location-based nature assessments. The group came together to tackle the hardest step in the nature journey: moving from diagnostic insight to credible strategic direction, embedded within core business strategy and investment planning to support long-term value creation.

Engagement throughout the Accelerator was strong, with participants consistently highlighting the value of structured peer exchange and applied, decision-oriented guidance.

WBCSD’s Nature Strategy Accelerator provided a unique space to shape Unilever’s nature strategy while learning from the experiences of like‑minded companies on the same journey. The peer exchange was invaluable in pressure‑testing our thinking and building a more robust, integrated strategic approach.

– Louise de Launoit, Strategy and Governance Manager – Nature, Unilever

At the same time, the shared experience of nature’s unsung company heroes surfaced a more sobering reality. Even for advanced companies, progress toward fully articulated nature approaches was slower and more complex than anticipated. While technical challenges remained significant, the biggest barriers were often internal: aligning functions, navigating governance processes, and making trade-offs due to constrained capital and competing priorities. 

The lessons from this cohort reinforce an important truth: integrating nature into corporate strategy is not a linear or purely technical exercise. It is a strategic transformation challenge – one that, when navigated successfully, enables companies to better manage risk, inform investment decisions, and build more resilient, future-fit business models. 

Why read this article? 

This article is written with two audiences in mind: 

• Nature and sustainability leads within companies, particularly those navigating the shift from assessment to strategy. If you are struggling to maintain momentum, justify investment or translate complex nature data into decisions that resonate with finance and strategy teams, you are not alone, and there are practical ways forward.  
• Committed partners – including NGOs, initiatives, finance institutions, and policymakers – who are engaging with companies on nature. The journey to embed nature into business models resembles turning a large ship. It is not easy and takes time, coordination, and sustained support. Progress is fastest when expectations are grounded in corporate realities and when nature leaders are enabled and encouraged versus pressured and shamed.  

What follows distils key insights from the Accelerator and lessons learned that can help companies advance on their nature journey. We share the most common challenges companies face, and potential ways forward. These insights are incorporated into the 2026 Accelerator program. 

Challenge #1: Making the business case… again 

The number one challenge that kept surfacing was related to the need to justify working on nature with the current sustainability headwinds.  

From compliance to strategic signal

CSRD has been an effective entry point, helping elevate nature and biodiversity topics on company agendas and unlock resource allocation. However, compliance alone isn’t enough to justify making the business case. With Omnibus uncertainties, the perceived transition risks have reduced. Companies who were primarily focused on transition risks are now struggling to advance their nature agenda. Companies also noted that the guidance on how to conduct materiality assessments is unclear – it can feel as though anything can be considered material, or not. 

• Companies discussed how “not to waste” initial CSRD assessments. Leading companies emphasized the value of building on initial impact screenings by deepening analysis of dependencies, which often reveal hidden physical risks in value chains and operations—risks that matter directly to business continuity and asset value. 
• This is where Accelerator participation adds value: it helps companies translate assessments into prioritization logic that strategy and finance teams can engage with, rather than treating materiality as a reporting exercise. WBCSD’s CP&A will be focused on materiality (link here). 

Revealing dependencies to unlock strategic value

Many companies still approach nature primarily through impacts, reinforcing perceptions of nature as philanthropic rather than strategic. Yet physical risks –water availability, soil stability, ecosystem resilience – are most closely linked to dependencies on nature. 

• Many companies found that when dependencies were explicitly analysed and stress-tested through scenarios with finance teams, nature moved from an abstract concern to a material input into investment, sourcing and asset-management decisions. 
• A core outcome of the Accelerator is helping companies reframe nature as a driver of operational resilience and long-term value, not an optional add-on. 

Navigating greenhushing with confidence

While many companies are advancing climate and nature strategies internally, hesitation to disclose nature strategies remains high, often driven by past reversals on climate commitments or uncertainty as the nature agenda continues to evolve. The Business for Nature Pulse report lays out a number of reasons why a company should disclose, including enhanced resilience, better risk management, new revenue opportunities, stronger brand reputation, and improved regulatory positioning. This is backed up by Anthesis Group’s Cost of Silence report which shows that organizations demonstrating transparent sustainability leadership benefit from up to a 6% higher operating profit margin, stronger share price performance, and measurable reputational gains. 

Furthermore, WBCSD’s recent review of the link of a company’s sustainability performance and corporate valuation clearly demonstrates: strategic, credible disclosure is directly linked to tangible financial and reputational outcomes. 

• In this context, greenhushing can represent a missed opportunity—foregoing value creation at a time when stakeholders increasingly reward clarity, intent, and progress over perfection. 
• Companies that balance robust assessment with proportionate, transparent communication are more likely to strengthen investor confidence, protect and enhance reputation, and outperform peers financially.

The data is unequivocal: companies that move beyond silence and communicate their sustainability performance, including on nature, credibly and proportionately are rewarded by the market. Silence is no longer a risk-free option; done well, disclosure is a value creator.

– Betsy Hickman, Global Nature Lead,  Anthesis Group. 

Building literacy where it matters 

Nature has a marketing problem. The term “nature” is regularly used inter-changeably with “biodiversity” and is still seen as “just pandas and whales”. Companies are focusing on impacts and fewer on dependencies on ecosystem goods and services. This means that nature loss is often seen as a philanthropic issue rather than one of preventing physical and transitional risks.  

• Participants consistently highlighted the need for ongoing internal education, particularly as non-specialist colleagues are increasingly drawn into decision-making. 
• WBCSD has a whole program on capability building for nature targeted to different maturity levels. The Nature Foundations: Masterclass series helps build a common understanding on the importance of addressing nature loss for business continuity and how. The Accelerator then enables companies to transform their nature assessments into a narrative and a strategic approach that resonates far more strongly with strategy, procurement, and finance functions. 

Challenge #2: Structuring data, metrics and targets to inform decisions 

Even advanced companies struggled to organize data in ways that meaningfully support strategy and capital allocation. 

From data overload to decision-useful insights 

Accelerator participants cited challenges in data management, classification, and prioritization, including supply-chain data gaps and inconsistent information. Understanding how to leverage existing resources to jump start a nature journey (whether that’s a Scope 3 Inventory or Double Materiality Assessment) holds the key to streamlining data into decision-useful insights.

• Anthesis Group advised participants to prioritize the suppliers and raw materials that matter most – those with the greatest business relevance and potential impact on nature. Companies should begin by concentrating on high‑volume, priority commodities and those with the greatest environmental footprint, as identified in the SBTN High Impact Commodity List, instead of trying to assess their entire supplier base at once. 
• Using the SBTN traceability tiers as a guide, procurement teams can sequence their efforts by first focusing on commodities where traceability and data availability are strongest. This enables companies to build early visibility upstream, evaluate exposure to nature‑related risks, and then progressively expand into additional high‑impact commodities over time, thereby laying the foundation for more nature‑positive and resilient supply chains. 

Scaling site-level action into credible global targets 

Companies also wrestled with how site- and landscape-level actions meaningfully aggregate to national or global organizational targets, and how to meaningfully support implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework and national biodiversity strategy and action plans (NBSAPs). Challenges included balancing global with local decision-making, differing levels of granularity and standardizing metrics and methodologies.   

• In an external adviser role, UNEP-WCMC recommended identifying potential contributions per site for a few globally relevant topics and aggregating to develop a stretch but realistic target. In this way, companies can have fewer targets at a global level and more detailed targets at a site level.  
• Companies repeatedly highlighted that inconsistent or missing site‑level metrics made it difficult to track progress and benchmark performance. WBCSD’s Nature Action Portal serves as an accessible entry point for selecting harmonized metrics that support both local decision‑making and global reporting (see forthcoming primer later in 2026). 
• Participants learned how activity‑based programs were insufficient for demonstrating meaningful progress but granular actions could “ladder up” to global commitments when connected by a logical narrative to a company’s strategic ambitions. By helping companies connect granular action to strategic ambition, the Accelerator supports the shift from activity-based programs to a target-led strategy. 

Challenge #3: Navigating corporate realities of setting strategy 

Perhaps the most underestimated challenges were organizational rather than technical. 

Strategy cycles and governance constraints

While integrating nature into core corporate strategy is the long-term goal, Accelerator participants highlighted how strategy cycles and governance processes can constrain timing. Securing board- or C-suite-level endorsement mid-cycle is rarely straightforward. One requirement of the Now for Nature campaign is high-level buy-in from board or C-suite, but companies shared how this becomes difficult when the corporate strategy is already set, to open it back-up again mid-cycle.  

• The Accelerator helps companies identify pragmatic pathways—for example, embedding nature components within existing strategic pillars such as regenerative agriculture or climate adaptation—while building the case for deeper integration over time. 

Climate still dominates—and that can be leveraged 

Many companies noted that climate continues to command disproportionate attention. Rather than competing, several Accelerator participants used this to their advantage, integrating nature through nature-based solutions, climate adaptation or integrated transition planning.

• This aligns with WBCSD’s recent guidance to integrated transition planning, which points toward single, integrated assessments rather than multiple parallel processes—reducing burden while improving strategic coherence. 

Change takes time

A clear takeaway from the Accelerator is that credible nature strategy takes time. For advanced companies, three years from assessment to disclosure is not unusual: one year for deep assessment, one for internal engagement, and one for refinement and governance. 

With advances in technology, short cuts may be possible for the assessment phase, but otherwise, businesses need time to have enough confidence in the outcomes and to bring colleagues from different functions to be able to digest and really start to integrate the implications. Furthermore, the reality is that if hidden physical and transition risks are uncovered, no company is going to disclose these without having a plan in place to manage these risks, which increases the overall time from starting the process to sharing disclosures. 

• Accelerator participants emphasized the importance of interim milestones—such as becoming a TNFD Adopter or pursuing validation through SBTN Step Up for Nature. These can help to validate a company’s nature assessment and prioritization of impacts—to maintain momentum, build confidence, and signal progress internally and externally while strategies mature. 

What the Nature Strategy Accelerator unlocks 

Taken together, these lessons learned showcase the real value of engaging in a platform like the Nature Strategy Accelerator for member companies: 

• Moving from assessment to action-oriented strategy, grounded in business reality. 
• Accelerating internal alignment across sustainability, strategy, finance, procurement, and operations. 
• Enabling companies to translate complex nature data into decision-relevant insights for capital allocation and risk management. 
• Providing a trusted peer-to-peer environment to test assumptions, pressure-test approaches, and learn what works in practice. 

What’s next 

We are busy putting the final touches to the 2026 Accelerator cohort for WBCSD members in the Nature Action project, launching on 18 March. 

The 2026 program is designed to give companies clearer, faster, and more aligned pathways to deliver on nature‑related commitments, reducing internal complexity while increasing strategic coherence across the evolving landscape of standards and expectations. 

To support this, we are integrating the latest guidance from TNFD’s Guidance on Nature in Transition Plans and WBCSD’s Introduction to Integrated Transition Planning into the Accelerator curriculum. This offers a single, streamlined approach to helping members move from high‑level commitments to practical, implementable transition plans. By aligning with leading global frameworks, companies gain greater confidence that their actions are credible, comparable, and positioned to meet rising investor, regulatory, and stakeholder expectations. 

We are also incorporating actionable insights from the Embed Nature program of the @A‑Track project. This helps companies speak directly to the needs of core business functions, including procurement and corporate finance, thereby improving cross‑functional ownership and accelerating internal decision‑making.

In parallel, we will continue to work closely with Business for Nature, TNFD, SBTN, and other capacity‑building partners to harmonize approaches, share lessons learned, and ensure each offering is tailored to companies’ maturity levels. This reduces duplication of effort for business and ensures that companies benefit from coordinated, high‑quality, and up‑to‑date guidance.

If you would like to learn more about joining WBCSD’s Nature Action Imperative, please contact nature@wbcsd.org or visit our Nature Action webpage.