Nature Positive Corporate Assessment Guide for Financial Institutions 2025

How financial institutions are getting started: Financial institutions already have access to information from companies across multiple sectors that are increasingly assessing and disclosing their material nature-related issues. This shift is driven by the EU’s CSRD and increasing commitments to disclose in alignment with TNFD. However, the lack of a universally accepted definition of – or standardized methodologies for – materiality leads to variability in disclosures, resulting in uneven structure and granularity in reporting across sectors and geographies. Certain sectors, particularly those with well-known nature impacts and dependencies – including mining and metals, chemicals and agriculture – are more advanced in their ability to assess and disclose material nature-related issues. These companies, to varying extents, are already capable of geographically locating their nature impacts and dependencies. This is more feasible for owned assets such as mines, plants, farms and factories. However, upstream and downstream impacts and dependencies remain challenging. For example, Anglo American conducted an assessment in 2023 using a qualitative approach to evaluate nature-related issues as well as associated timeframes. The results highlighted that access to water and tailings management are material issues for the company under a double materiality approach.31 For financial institutions, such information provides valuable insights on where the company stands today, forming the basis for further actions. However, since not all companies will have performed materiality assessments, financial institutions can use tools such as ENCORE32 to generate heatmaps and assign sector average ratings for impacts and dependencies (e.g. low, medium and high). Companies can then use these ratings as proxies for materiality assessments. Similarly, sector-level emissions data was used as a proxy for climate target-setting purposes when company-level emissions data was still scarce. This allows financial institutions to pinpoint sectors where significant nature-related issues are prevalent and evaluate sector averages for companies before more robust data becomes available. Table 1 presents a heatmap detailing material issues by driver and sector. Certain sectors, particularly those with well-known nature impacts and dependencies – including mining and metals, chemicals and agriculture – are more advanced in their ability to assess and disclose material nature- related issues. Nature Positive: Corporate Assessment Guide for Financial Institutions 19