Part 4 of 4: Resilience for Nature-Based Solutions: Insights from People and Nature

For decades, the dominant logic of global business has been efficiency. It made sense at the time as companies optimized their operating models to deliver quickly and reduced costs within their supply chains to ensure competitiveness. This approach worked well in a relatively stable world, but is now showing its limits. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how quickly supply chains designed for efficiency can break down, and climate change is reinforcing the same lesson. In an era of frequent and compounding ecological and social shocks, an exclusive focus on narrow efficiency has become a liability. Resilience has become a strategic imperative for business, and nature is central to building it. In this context, resilience refers to the capacity of a business to maintain its essential functions, adapt, and continue to develop amid ongoing uncertainty and disruption.

Across this series, we have explored resilience as a capacity that is measured locally, lived in communities, and scaled through alignment with local realities rather than top-down imposition. In this concluding piece, we turn to the businesses whose supply chains begin in those same communities. The first impacts of supply-chain disruption are often felt by farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and rural communities before they show up in corporate risk registers. These groups often have the least financial capacity to absorb shocks, even though they hold the knowledge and stewardship practices that keep production landscapes functioning. Recognizing where disruption begins is an important starting point for any business resilience strategy.

Why Nature Risk Has Become a Business Risk

These dependencies are already being tested. More than half of agribusinesses surveyed in Regrow’s 2026 State of AgResilience report identified extreme weather as a top climate risk and supply chain disruptor. The effects are starting to be visible across commodities. In West and Central Africa, past deforestation for cocoa production is associated with disruptions to the rainfall cycle and has contributed to its harvest failures due to prolonged droughts. The supply of shea butter for the multi-billion dollar global cosmetics market is under threat because of the significant impact of pollinator loss – being one of many ‘pollinator limited’ crops, for which pollinator visits is a primary factor affecting yield (WEF 2020). Although some businesses continue to respond with a short-term ‘trader’ mindset by switching sourcing to a less risky location when problems arise, this logic collapses when climate shocks affect multiple regions at the same time. Instead, a growing number of businesses are investing in ecosystem restoration and regeneration as Nature-based Solutions (NbS) that can safeguard their production over the longer term.

This shift reflects a change in how nature and climate risk are understood in the corporate sector. Nature-related risks are increasingly treated as material financial risks rather than as abstract externalities. The change is happening even as the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) framework faces political pressure. In 2025, many companies in the United States reduced their public references to ESG amid a polarized political landscape. Across the Atlantic, the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) have faced pushback, with an Omnibus process steered toward reduced administrative, regulatory and reporting burdens. Despite this, the underlying environmental pressure on companies has never been greater. As a result, more companies are starting to move from passive disclosure and compliance toward integrating nature-related risks into core enterprise risk management and decision-making.

Part of this transition involves addressing a common blind spot of knowing the value at stake beyond companies’ direct operations. Nature risk tends to appear at multiple layers:

1. Operational – disruption may halt logistics and production
2. Strategic – degradation may compromise the long-term viability of feedstock and key sourcing regions
3. Financial – companies may face higher input costs, more volatile earnings, and rising costs of capital
4. Regulatory – new regulations and trade rules such as the EU Deforestation Regulation or Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism may add costs and risk where supply chains rely on carbon-intensive or extractive production rather than systems that protect or restore natural ecosystems

Companies that quantify these risks are better positioned to justify the Return on Investment of regenerative programs by connecting supply instability and price volatility to specific business variables. Ultimately, this helps move the internal conversation from awareness toward concrete action.

Practical Steps for the Transition

Nature is inherently place-based and complex, which can make the task of integrating it into business strategy feel difficult to begin. Yet we’re starting to have a range of robust tools now available to help companies start. A useful principle here is that action beats perfection.

Businesses should not delay resilience investments while waiting for perfect data and metrics, and can instead focus on process discipline and improve their approach over time (Nature-Based Insights, 2026).

Several tools and frameworks support this work:

• The Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) provides methods for setting targets aligned with planetary boundaries, with over 150 companies preparing to set such targets. The SBTN’s recommended target-setting process helps structure it into five steps: Assess, Prioritize, Set targets, Act and Track.

• The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) has seen significant uptake, with over 730 adopters, and its LEAP approach, which stands for Locate, Evaluate, Assess and Prepare, offers a structured methodology for identifying nature-related issues and carrying out due diligence. The mitigation hierarchy, which directs companies to avoid, minimize, restore and then offset impacts in that order, helps ensure that interventions have integrity.
• Standardized biodiversity metrics are also emerging, including Mean Species Abundance and the Biodiversity Intactness Index, which help companies quantify their nature footprint.
• The most recent IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment provides the first multilaterally approved scientific evidence base for this work, and shifts the conversation from why businesses should care to how they must act. It identifies four levels at which firms can address their impacts and dependencies: operations, value chain, corporate, and portfolio.
• For guidance on addressing physical risks in value chains, engaging senior executives and building an internal strategy for resilience, the WBCSD and BCG CEO Handbook for Executive Engagement offers a practical reference.

Toward a Holistic Strategy

The most effective NbS are those that move beyond fragmented, farm-level projects toward a landscape approach (Seddon et al., 2021). Restoring an entire watershed or supporting all farmers in a production region, as examples, allows benefits to accumulate across multiple objectives and supports more reliable long-term production.

The way these solutions are implemented matters as much as the tools used to design them. The first mile of the supply chain should be the priority, and durable outcomes depend on co-designing solutions with Indigenous Peoples and local communities as equal economic partners rather than as simply downstream beneficiaries. Frameworks such as the IUCN Global Standard for NbS help keep interventions effective, equitable, and culturally appropriate. Where the people who steward the land are excluded, interventions are more likely to be reversed, which undermines the resilience they were meant to create.

Nature as a Competitive Edge in Finance

The finance sector is also changing its relationship with nature. Investors and lenders are moving from simply reporting environmental harm toward rewarding nature-positive stewardship (TNFD, 2025). Nature-related physical risks, such as soil degradation, water scarcity, and pollinator decline, are increasingly placed in the same category as credit and operational risks. The implication for businesses is that disregarding a pro-nature strategy is becoming a material liability.

Here are some examples of the shift in practice:

• Goldman Sachs Asset Management launched the Goldman Sachs Biodiversity Bond Fund, described as one of the first fixed income funds to give investors portfolio exposure to biodiversity conservation and remediation.
• Rabobank operates a 3-billion-euro transition fund and uses a Biodiversity Monitor to offer interest rate reductions to farmers who meet specific KPIs for soil health and biodiversity.
• Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) sets explicit nature expectations for the companies it invests in, particularly focusing on ecosystem resilience and productivity across land, water and ocean ecosystems.
• BNP Paribas applies dedicated criteria to steer its financing and investment toward ocean protection, recognizing the importance of issues linked to species extinction risks, including sustainable fish stock management.
• Swiss Re has developed a Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (BES) Index, which aggregates multiple ecosystem services to assess spatial ecosystem condition and identify potential risks.

We’re starting to see an emergence of new nature-based corporate models being proposed, such as the Natural Asset Companies spearheaded by the Intrinsic Exchange Group, which are designed to hold rights to ecosystem services and treat them as investable assets. While still at an early stage, it reflects a growing line of thinking about how nature is being valued and incorporated into the financial sector.

The growth of these financial instruments is encouraging, but their integrity depends on who benefits and what they actually deliver. Currently, much private biodiversity finance is only indirectly linked to measurable outcomes and can sideline the communities who steward the land (Carter et al., 2026). Genuine resilience is built only when returns are tied to verified ecological gains and local rights are protected.

Conclusion

The transition from extraction to regeneration is one of the most significant business opportunities of our time. The businesses most likely to capture it will be those that move from high-level commitments toward concrete, place-based action that stabilizes the ecosystems and supports the communities underpinning their supply chains, and through them the wider economy. Efficiency was suited to a more stable world. Resilience is what businesses need to operate in the world as it

is now, and nature is a central part of how they build it. Ultimately, resilience is built when communities have the resources, rights, and agency to steward the landscapes that businesses depend on.

This concludes our four-part series on resilience for Nature-based Solutions. The series has examined how we measure resilience, how communities experience and build it, how it can be scaled, and how businesses can strengthen it through their supply chains. Across all four pieces, a consistent theme holds: resilience is built from the ground up, with nature and people together.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Rupert Evill (Ethics Insight), Alain Vidal (Quantis), Nicolas Fabre (Livelihoods Venture) and Daniel McQuillan (Intrinsic Exchange Group) for sharing their insights for this piece, as well as to Nature for Justice’s Hank Cauley and Nicci Mander for their guidance and support across this series.

References

Carter, H., Thompson, B. S., Bull, J. W., Dickman, A., Jones, J. P. G., Shrikanth, S., & zu Ermgassen, S. O. S. E. (2026). Demystifying biodiversity finance. Nature Reviews Biodiversity. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-026-00155-z

Nature-Based Insights and the Nature-based Solutions Initiative (2026). From Risk to Resilience: How Scaling Nature-Based Solutions Across Production Landscapes Can Future-Proof Business. https://www.naturebasedsolutionsinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/From_Risk_to_Resilience_Policy_Brief_2026.pdf

Regrow (2026). State of Ag Resilience: Business and supply chain collaboration drives progress. https://www.regrow.ag/whitepaper/2026-state-of-ag-resilience

Seddon, N., Smith, A., Smith, P., Key, I., Chausson, A., Girardin, C., House, J., Srivastava, S., & Turner, B. (2021). Getting the message right on nature-based solutions to climate change. Global Change Biology, 27(8), 1518–1546. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15513

TNFD (2025). Discussion Paper on State of Nature Measurement. https://tnfd.global/publication/discussion-paper-on-state-of-nature-measurement/

WBCSD (2025). Physical Risk and Resilience in Value Chains: A CEO Handbook for Executive Engagement. https://www.wbcsd.org/resources/physical-risk-and-resilience-in-value-chains/

WEF (2020). Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_New_Nature_Economy_Report_2020.pdf

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Past Insights from the Resilience for Nature-Based Solutions Series

Part 1: The Building Blocks of Resilience: How Do We Measure What Matters?

Part 2: From the Ground Up: Lessons from the World’s Communities Fostering Resilience

Part 3: Scaling Resilience: Aligning Global Pathways with Local Realities