Nikita Asthana on Building Resilience on Food and Agriculture

The questions facing corporate sustainability reach into how a business operates: where it invests, how it sources materials and how it prepares for disruption. Connecting climate and nature risks to those decisions calls for reliable information and close working relationships across sustainability, finance and operating teams.

 

Reporting can support accountability and help people make more informed decisions. For company leaders, that may mean a clearer investment choice or a better understanding of operational exposure. For investors and lenders, it may mean a more informed assessment of a company’s prospects. In this edition of the OneStop ESG Thought Leadership Series, Nikita Asthana discusses what it takes to build resilience in food and agriculture, embed sustainability into core business decision-making, and turn sustainability reporting into intelligence that informs strategy, risk and capital allocation.

 

Q1. As a global sustainability leader in food and agriculture, what is front and centre for you right now?

 

Nikita Asthana: What is front and centre for me is resilience - how we build greater resilience into a food and agriculture system that is already inherently volatile. Agriculture has always had to manage uncertainty, as weather, crop disease, commodity cycles and geopolitics can all lead to sudden supply shocks. We are now layering on two much more structural forces: climate change and the degradation of the natural ecosystems on which agriculture depends. These are not temporary shocks that disappear when a cycle turns. They are systemic changes that will increasingly affect yields, supply availability, prices and livelihoods. Climate change is already increasing risks from extreme heat, changing rainfall patterns, droughts, floods and pest outbreaks.

 

The challenge is compounded by the economics of the value chain. Food and agricultural commodities often travel through long and fragmented supply chains - from farmers through aggregators, traders and processors to consumer-goods companies, retailers and ultimately consumers. The capacity to absorb risk, finance transition and capture economic value is not evenly distributed across that chain. Farmers are often among the most exposed to climate and nature-related risks, while having relatively limited capacity to finance the changes needed to build resilience. Many of the technical solutions are already known. The harder question is whether the economics and incentives across the value chain allow them to be adopted at scale.

 

There is also a significant consumer-awareness gap. Food is so fundamental to everyday life that we often take for granted what sits behind it - how it was grown, the natural resources that went into producing it, and livelihoods of the farmers who produced it. Take rice: across Asia, it provides more than half of daily calories, while its cultivation uses around 30% of global freshwater and accounts for about 12% of global methane emissions. Yet how often, when we buy or eat rice, do we think about these impacts - or whether the rice was produced in a way that uses less water, generates fewer emissions and supports more resilient farmer livelihoods? Building that connection between consumption and production is an important part of changing the system.

 

This brings us back to what building resilience looks like in practice. Soil health sits at the heart of the equation: better soil management can strengthen productivity and resilience while reducing soil and water loss, improving nutrient retention and storing more carbon. But scaling these practices is not simply about mobilising more capital; it is about structuring finance to share transition costs and risks across the value chain, while improving the economics for farmers to adopt more resilient practices. Carbon finance, blended finance and supply-chain investment can all play a role in changing those economics and enabling adoption at scale.

 

Q2. What does it really take to move sustainability from a standalone agenda into the way a business is run?

 

Nikita Asthana: A company can have ambitious sustainability targets, sophisticated reporting and dozens of sustainability initiatives - and sustainability can still remain a standalone agenda. The real test is whether climate, nature and social considerations influence how the business sets strategy, manages risk, allocates capital and makes operational decisions.

 

Businesses and investors are navigating an increasingly complex environment: macroeconomic uncertainty, geopolitical risk and supply disruptions; evolving regulation and consumer preferences; and rapidly emerging opportunities competing for capital and strategic focus - AI is perhaps the best example today. It is fundamental for sustainability leaders to recognise that the sustainability agenda does not exist - and cannot be driven - in a silo. It is part of this broader mix of risks, opportunities and competing priorities that businesses are constantly navigating.

 

Rather than asking business leaders to make room for sustainability, sustainability leaders need to put themselves in the shoes of business leaders and investors. Start with the business: Where is it trying to grow? What do its customers need? What could disrupt its strategy? What are its critical dependencies? Then ask where climate, nature and social factors create new opportunities or risks, and where the existing strategy itself may have dependencies or exposures that are not yet fully recognised.

 

That shift has shaped my own journey. My earlier work, like that of many sustainability practitioners, centred heavily on reporting, metrics and materiality. Increasingly, my focus has been on institutionalising integrated thinking - embedding climate, nature and social considerations into the processes through which businesses actually make decisions.

 

In practice, that has meant putting natural, social and financial capital alongside one another in an Integrated P&L; embedding ESG due diligence into investment decisions; integrating climate and nature into enterprise risk management; and working with businesses to understand the implications of climate change and degrading natural ecosystems for crop yields, sourcing, raw-material costs and supply continuity, business continuity, labour productivity, and the availability and cost of insurance.

 

There is certainly merit in focused adaptation projects - for example, to build resilience in a particularly exposed supply chain or asset. But at an enterprise level, truly adapting to a world with a drastically different climate and state of natural ecosystems is a structural, permanent and unprecedented challenge. Disparate adaptation projects will not be sufficient. It requires a more fundamental transformation in how businesses are run - embedding climate, nature and social considerations into strategy, risk management, capital allocation and operational decisions. To me, this is what meaningful adaptation ultimately looks like: building these considerations into the organisation’s core decision-making so that it is better equipped to survive and thrive as the physical world around it changes.

 

And I think we are already seeing this evolution in how sustainability is positioned within organisations. Superficially, it may sometimes appear that sustainability is receding. Look more closely, however, and much of it is being embedded into the way businesses understand risk, set strategy and allocate capital. To me, that does not make sustainability less relevant - it makes it more consequential to business.

 

Q3. We often talk about the challenges of sustainability reporting. Where do you see its greatest value?

 

Nikita Asthana: Sustainability reporting has fundamentally evolved. We have moved from asking “How much water did we use?” to asking “What is the financial and operational risk to our business if water availability or cost changes, particularly in water-intensive operations in water-stressed locations?” That is a very different question.

 

This evolution reflects changes in the physical world around us. Seven of the nine planetary boundaries have now been breached, and environmental risks dominate the World Economic Forum's long-term global risk outlook. Sustainability reporting has evolved accordingly - from predominantly measuring a company's impacts on people and planet towards also examining how climate change, nature degradation, regulation and other sustainability-related factors could affect the company's own prospects. The audience has broadened too - from a historically strong focus on NGOs and civil society to investors who need comparable, decision-useful information to understand climate, nature and other sustainability-related risk exposures across sectors and geographies.

 

We have seen the emergence of IFRS sustainability disclosure standards focused on financially material sustainability-related risks and opportunities. And with that comes much greater rigour: sustainability information is increasingly subject to formal assurance, with new global sustainability assurance standards emerging, and in many organisations, reporting has moved closer to the CFO and mainstream financial-reporting functions.

 

For me, this is precisely where the value of sustainability reporting lies. If done well, the work required to report on financial materiality generates intelligence the company itself needs. Climate scenario analysis, nature-risk assessments and analysis of regulatory and consumer shifts can inform enterprise risk management, investment decisions and business strategy - helping businesses anticipate and prepare for changes in raw-material costs and supply, physical risks to operations, and shifts in markets and regulation.

 

Of course, some of this analysis is extraordinarily complex. Under current policies, global warming by end of this century is projected at around 2.8°C – a level of warming we, as humanity, have never experienced. How do you build and back-test a model for conditions we have never experienced? Climate scenario analysis draws on interconnected models linking different warming pathways to physical and socioeconomic impacts. For agriculture, we then need to understand how changing temperatures and precipitation, water availability, extreme weather, pollination and other ecosystem services interact to affect crop yields. The interconnections between climate-nature-crop yields are highly crop-specific and location-specific. The complexity is enormous.

 

In practice, I have found it important to prioritise such analysis for business models and supply chains that may be most exposed. We are also transparent about assumptions, limitations and margins of error, while not waiting for perfect data or perfect models. We use the best information available and, in parallel, integrate those insights into actual business decisions. In fact, I think using this analysis internally is one of the strongest tests of its credibility: it demonstrates that the work is being undertaken to inform the business, not simply to satisfy a reporting requirement.

 

Ultimately, the value of sustainability reporting is not the report itself. Its outputs can be extremely powerful when they are developed with the intention of informing real decisions and are owned and positioned appropriately within the organisation. Where sustainability reporting sits, who uses its outputs and whether they feed into strategy, risk and capital allocation are strategic choices for CEOs and Boards.

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this interview are those of Nikita Asthana, informed by her experience as a sustainability practitioner in the food and agriculture sector, and do not necessarily reflect the views of her employer or other organisations with which she is affiliated.