Nature on the balance sheet

Most CFOs already spend their days managing things they cannot fully control: volatile supply chains, the rising cost of capital, an insurance market that keeps repricing risk, regulation that arrives faster than it can be absorbed, and the constant pressure to keep the business resilient through all of it. Nature has not traditionally sat on that list. It has been filed under sustainability, treated as a matter for the corporate responsibility team, reported once a year, and rarely connected to the numbers that move a forecast.

That separation is becoming harder to defend. A new guide from the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), produced with Accounting for Sustainability (A4S) and released on 2 June 2026 at the A4S Summit, makes the case directly to finance leaders. Its argument, stated in the introduction, is that nature is "a foundational input to financial performance," and that its degradation can translate into higher costs, disrupted operations, impaired assets and constrained financing. In other words, nature belongs in the same financial conversation as everything else on the CFO's desk.

The guide is titled Asking Better Questions on Nature for Chief Financial Officers, and the title is the method. Rather than instructing CFOs to become ecologists, it gives them a structured set of questions to put to their own teams: the kind of probing, "show me the evidence" questioning that finance leaders already apply to any other source of financial risk.

 

What the guide actually does

The guide is built around eleven questions, grouped into five themes:

• Understanding nature's relevance to the business. How and where the organisation depends and impacts on nature, and how that is already showing up financially.
• Assessing and prioritising risks and opportunities. Making nature-related risks visible and connecting them to potential financial implications.
• Integrating nature into decision making and financial planning. Governance, strategy, targets and incentives.
• Responding to market expectations. Investor relations, reporting and disclosure.
• Building capacity across the organisation. Whether the finance team has the skills and reach to lead.

According to the guide, the questions are not meant to be a step-by-step process. They can be used in full or selectively, depending on an organisation's size, sector and starting point, and each question is paired with guidance on what a good answer should look like and which team to direct it to. The guide is explicit that the level and pace of progress will vary by the size, sector and location of the organisation, and that the priority is simply getting started and building sophistication over time.

A few of the questions illustrate the approach:

• "How and where does our business depend and impact on nature, and how may this change over time?" TNFD suggests CFOs look for whether their teams have compared the location of assets and activities against ecologically sensitive areas, and whether the analysis extends beyond direct operations into the upstream and downstream value chain, where impacts and dependencies are often largest.
• "How are nature-related issues already having financial implications?" The guide is candid that this relationship is "typically poorly understood and underexplored," and points to concrete examples a finance team should be able to trace: rising insurance costs, the cost of complying with deforestation regulation, or reduced productivity from soil degradation. It encourages starting with simple "what if?" scenario analysis to connect a dependency, such as reliance on freshwater in a water-stressed region, to a plausible financial consequence.
• "How do we integrate nature-related considerations into our strategy and financial planning?" The guide walks through how nature can be embedded into capital expenditure decisions, budgeting and forecasting, including practical techniques like setting an exclusion threshold, applying a "shadow price" for a resource such as water, or running sensitivity analysis on revenue exposed to water stress.
• "How do we set nature targets?" It reminds CFOs that they may be the ones signing off on nature-related targets and ensuring they are properly resourced and aligned with capital and operational budgets.

What makes the guide useful is that it consistently tells CFOs what to look for in a response: the markers of a credible answer versus a superficial one. It is, in effect, a due-diligence checklist structured as a set of questions.

 

The opportunity, not just the risk

It would be easy to read a guide like this as a catalogue of threats, but the document is careful to give equal weight to the upside. One of its eleven questions is devoted entirely to identifying and prioritising nature-related opportunities, on the logic that the same dependencies and impacts that create risk can also create value.

The guide groups these opportunities into recognisable categories: operational efficiency and resilience, such as addressing the internal costs tied to a dependency; new products or services that respond to the drivers of nature loss; greater supply chain resilience; business model innovation; and financial innovation, including nature-supportive financing instruments. The recurring example is water. A business that improves its water-use efficiency, the guide notes, can benefit from both cost savings and a reduced impact on a stressed resource, capturing a financial gain and an environmental one at the same time.

For a CFO, the framing matters. Positioning nature purely as a compliance burden tends to push it back towards the sustainability team. Positioning it as a question of resilience and value creation is what brings it onto the finance agenda, and the guide is deliberate about making that second case.

 

Why this matters now

The timing is not incidental. The guide lands at a moment when expectations around nature are tightening from several directions at once. According to the guide, regulation and investor expectations vary by jurisdiction and sector but are increasing overall, with policy developments covering biodiversity, deforestation, land use, water and pollution. Investors, it says, are increasingly signalling that they want clear, comparable information on a company's nature-related risk exposure, how those risks are managed, and what they mean for resilience and long-term value.

The guide's framing is that this is a reason to act early rather than wait. It encourages CFOs to understand current and emerging requirements, evaluate existing practices, and identify gaps in processes, capacity and data before expectations become more established.

It also points to evidence that the financial materiality is already here:

• The guide cites a 2025 survey of investee companies by Norges Bank Investment Management, reporting that 44% of respondents considered nature-related physical risks to be having financial effects already today, and 28% said the same of transition risks.
• It draws on a TNFD evidence review, produced with the University of Oxford and Global Canopy from over 600 pieces of evidence, identifying water scarcity, liability, reputational and policy risks as the areas with the strongest evidence of material financial effect.

 

What CFOs should do with it

The guide is realistic about the starting point. It accepts that full quantification of nature-related financial implications is beyond most organisations today, that methodologies are "still under development," and that qualitative, directional analysis, even a simple high/medium/low heat map, is a valid first step. The message is to begin and increase sophistication over time, not to wait for perfect data.

In practice, the recurring theme is to integrate nature into existing processes rather than build parallel ones:

• Governance. Existing climate and risk governance can be extended to cover nature, the guide advises, to avoid creating new committees or reporting lines.
• Planning and risk. Capital expenditure appraisals, budgeting cycles and risk registers can absorb nature-related prompts.
• Data and controls. The finance team can apply the same controls it uses for financial data to nature data, with defined data owners, documented methodologies and consistent calculations, and act as a "gatekeeper" on what gets reported externally, reducing greenwashing risk.
• Financing. Credible nature management may improve access to capital through instruments like green bonds and sustainability-linked loans, while unmanaged risk tends to translate into a higher cost of capital.

The guide is also practical about budgeting mechanics, setting out approaches a finance team will already recognise: ring-fencing money for nature-related initiatives, allocating budgets across operating units, capital budgeting in non-monetary terms such as a water budget, and internal pricing, whether through a real charge on a resource or a shadow price used only in decision making. None of this requires a new toolkit, which is much of the point.

It also positions the finance function as a connector. The guide names different teams for different questions (risk, sustainability, procurement, investor relations, legal), and the CFO's role is to translate between them, turning complex nature information into decision-useful insight. The guide calls this building the organisation's "nature intelligence" as part of broader business intelligence.

 

What's actually at risk

The most reassuring line of argument in the guide is also its central one: a CFO does not need every answer today. What they need is to start asking the right questions, of the right teams, now, and to keep raising the bar as data and methods improve.

That is a deliberately modest ask, and a shrewd one. It meets finance leaders where they are, using tools and instincts they already have, rather than demanding fluency in a new discipline. But the modesty should not obscure the stakes. The guide is blunt that nature-related dependencies and impacts are "rarely integrated into core financial processes such as risk management, capital allocation, valuation and performance management," and that this creates material blind spots at a time of rising exposure. A blind spot in any of those processes is precisely the kind of thing a CFO is paid to find before it finds them.

Nature, in other words, is no longer just an environmental story. It is increasingly a question of resilience, valuation and value creation, which is to say, a finance story. This guide is an invitation to start treating it like one.

 

Sources: TNFD and Accounting for Sustainability, Asking Better Questions on Nature for Chief Financial Officers (June 2026); TNFD, University of Oxford and Global Canopy, Evidence review on the financial effects of nature-related risks (2025). Survey figures cited in the guide originate from a 2025 Norges Bank Investment Management survey of investee companies on nature-related risk perceptions.

 

Link to the report: here.