Procurement isn’t a barrier to nature action - it’s the engine driving it. When sustainability teams bring data, empathy, and commercial alignment, procurement becomes a powerful ally in building resilient supply chains. By engaging thoughtfully and collaboratively, businesses can reduce risk, build competitiveness, and accelerate meaningful action for nature.
Since 2020, orange prices have risen by 134%, including a 29% spike in the past year alone. In September 2025, the global orange juice market experienced one of its most severe shocks in recent history, with prices jumping from $2/kg to $7/kg (BBC InDepth, 2025). Drought and heat stress in Brazil, combined with hurricanes and long-term disease issues in Florida (such as citrus greening), simultaneously disrupted two of the world’s largest producers—triggering a massive supply shock.
For retailers and food manufacturers, the impact was immediate: empty shelves, disappointed customers, and multimillion-dollar hits to margin.
These shocks are often framed as commercial crises, but at their core, they reflect the business’s dependency on nature. When supply collapses and prices soar, sustainability teams need to support procurement just in crisis response, but in preventing future disruption.
Procurement, not sustainability, has the operational mandate and supplier influence required to respond effectively. To embed nature into daily decision-making, sustainability teams must learn to enable procurement in a way that aligns with commercial priorities, solves real problems, and supports performance metrics that procurement teams are actually accountable for.
In this blog, we share key lessons from working with market leaders on how sustainability teams can support procurement teams more effectively.
Procurement teams operate with a different scorecard than sustainability functions. Their world revolves around securing stable supply, procuring high quality goods, delivering cost savings, securing supplier performance, and minimising contractual and operational risk. They manage complex negotiations, juggle volatile markets, and are accountable for business continuity in highly exposed commodity categories.
To resonate, nature-related risks must be translated into measurable commercial impacts - price volatility, supply interruptions, margin erosion, and reputational risk.
Nature or sustainability considerations rarely appear independently as top-line KPIs for procurement. As a result, sustainability conversations can sometimes feel abstract, a distraction from the day-to-day realities procurement teams manage. The challenge for sustainability teams is to explain the link between nature and the KPIs procurement teams care about. For example, resilient interactions with nature often underpin quality, quantity and price.
Lesson: To gain traction, sustainability teams must clearly link nature risks to procurement’s commercial priorities.
The most effective way to build credibility with procurement is to arrive with concrete, localised insight - not general sustainability aspirations. Do the pre-work. Research should be specific to the commodity, geography, and suppliers the procurement team manages. For example, before meeting a fresh produce category lead, a sustainability team might compile data on:
Running a nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities (DIRO) assessment on the specific responsibilities of each procurement team can be helpful here.
And be honest about uncertainties. Procurement teams will spot flawed assumptions in generalised data models. Don’t hide them - own them. Invite procurement’s insights to refine the analysis and increase relevance.
Lesson: Credibility comes from bringing specific, commodity-level insight, and inviting procurement to help refine it.
Procurement teams already face sustainability-related challenges, even if they don’t label them that way. Human rights risks in cocoa, carbon emissions through fresh produce, pest outbreaks in wheat, deforestation controversies in palm oil, and animal welfare issues in poultry are all examples where environmental or social realities translate directly into supply chain instability.
These aren’t theoretical concerns for procurement teams - they disrupt contracts, force renegotiations, and drive up costs. Recognising and starting the conversation with the risks they’re already firefighting creates empathy and relevance.
Sustainability themes can also be an opportunity for procurement teams. For example, certifications gained through NGOs can build consumer trust and strengthen differentiation versus competitors.
Lesson: Nature risk is already a procurement problem, and opportunity, they just don’t always label it that way.
Ambitions must be co-defined with procurement, not handed down. Effective ambitions are:
For example:
“By 2030, set KPIs and commercial incentives for 80% of growers to actively invest in improving soil health to improve resilience.”
Co-designing goals fosters ownership and ensures that nature action becomes part of procurement strategy, not an external add-on.
Procurement needs tangible, feasible actions and a clear, time-bound roadmap to deliver. Start by identifying steps they can directly influence:
Examples of high-impact actions include:
Prioritise based on feasibility (supplier readiness, cost, internal capability) and impact (risk reduction, cost avoidance, resilience).
Then, co-build a clear roadmap:
Lesson: Success depends on building something procurement feels they own—not something they’re expected to adopt.
For most companies, supply chains are the primary source of nature-related risks. This makes procurement teams an essential stakeholder when it comes to mitigating risk and capturing opportunity. When sustainability teams engage with commercial insight, empathy, and alignment, procurement becomes a powerful ally in reducing nature-related risks.
The next era of supply chain resilience will be shaped by how effectively these two functions work together.
So the question is: how will you partner differently in 2026?
Start by grounding your discussions in data. Natcap’s Nature Intelligence Suite for Supply Chains gives you the insights you need to make a compelling business case to your procurement team.