Nature risk tools have never been more accessible.
ENCORE, WWF Risk Filter Suite, WRI Aqueduct, Global Forest Watch and SBTN guidance have made it significantly easier for organisations to begin assessing their impacts and dependencies on nature. That is’s real progress. These tools have accelerated awareness across sectors and lowered the barrier to entry for nature-related risk assessments.
But as organisations move beyond initial screening, a different question emerges. The question is no longer whether organisations can screen for nature risks. It is whether they can defend the decisions they make based on that screening.
Screening builds awareness. Decision-grade analysis reduces uncertainty, and that reduction in uncertainty enables more confident decisions.
Screening tools play an important role in early-stage assessments.
They are particularly well suited to:
Supporting the TNFD Locate phase
Raising internal awareness of potential nature-related risks
Identifying broad geographic hotspots
Highlighting high-impact commodities
Screening large portfolios at a high level
For example:
ENCORE provides industry-level impact and dependency screening
WWF Biodiversity Risk Filter enables spatial biodiversity hotspot screening
WWF Water Risk Filter and WRI Aqueduct provide basin-level water stress and drought indicators
Global Forest Watch tracks forest cover and deforestation trends
SBTN’s High Impact Commodity List identifies commodities likely to drive biodiversity loss
These tools are powerful starting points.
Most high-level tools rely on one or more of the following:
Industry-level averages
Country-level approximations
Aggregated composite risk scores
These approaches are highly effective for screening. As organisations move towards prioritisation and decision-making, additional specificity can help support more confident assessments
Consider ENCORE.
ENCORE can provide a global average score for the potential impacts and dependencies of ‘Growing of cereals (except rice), leguminous crops and oil seeds’. As a starting point, that can be useful to narrow down which sites or commodities you should focus on.
However, global averages may not fully reflect the specific geographic contexts in which businesses operate.
In practice, supply chains are typically defined by particular commodities and geographies, such as wheat grown in France.
Natcap builds on the same ISIC classifications used in ENCORE, and applies additional granularity. For example, rather than cereals as a single category, Natcap can assess wheat and rapeseed separately, in a specific country such as France, and evaluate those activities against the local state of nature and detailed ecosystem service drivers.
This added specificity can influence how confidently mitigation actions are prioritised and how capital is allocated.
Industry averages indicate potential exposure, while site- and commodity-specific analysis provides greater clarity on materiality.
Greater granularity helps ensure that the underlying drivers of risk are accurately understood.
Many publicly available tools operate at national or hydrobasin resolution.
This can be appropriate for high-level screening. In certain contexts, however, low resolution data may not fully capture site-level sensitivity, particularly where operations sit near protected areas, biodiversity hotspots or regions experiencing rapid land-use change.
Natcap provides site-level analysis, including:
Distance in metres to surrounding protected areas
Approximately 10-metre resolution land cover and forest change data
Use of minimum detectable change thresholds to avoid false signals
Site-specific buffer distances tailored by business activity type
Higher spatial precision improves the identification of genuinely sensitive locations, as it reduces both false positives and false negatives.
When mitigation budgets are finite and board scrutiny is increasing, this level of precision can enhance confidence in prioritisation decisions.
Another structural difference lies in how risks are aggregated.
Composite scoring systems often use weighted averages to combine multiple indicators. While useful for dashboards, this approach can dilute visibility into more severe risks.
For example, a site exposed to extreme drought risk but low scores elsewhere may receive a moderate composite rating. In some cases, aggregation may result in organisations underestimating their risk exposure.
Natcap uses a transparent “maximum score” approach for physical water risk. A site is flagged if it scores highly on any one of three indicators: water stress, drought risk, or water quality.
This approach can reduce the likelihood of overlooking concentrated exposure. It can strengthen defensibility under board or investor scrutiny and give sustainability leaders greater confidence that high-risk sites are appropriately identified.
Natcap incorporates many of the same underlying datasets used in widely available screening tools. The distinction lies in how those datasets are structured, combined and applied to support decision-making.
Natcap disaggregates ecosystem services into specific drivers, for example:
Soil fertility
Soil salinity
Soil compaction
Soil acidity
This level of detail enables organisations to better understand what is driving dependency and help them design more targeted mitigation strategies.
Natcap combines the magnitude of business activity (e.g. cubic metres of water used, kilograms of pollutant emitted) with state-of-nature concern scores. This shifts the focus from “Is there risk?” to “How material is this risk relative to others?”
Combining exposure with magnitude supports:
Evidence-based prioritisation of mitigation spend
Clearer linkage between environmental and financial materiality
More defensible capital allocation decisions
Natcap also offers a great breadth of metrics, enabling more precise risk identification, for example, exposure to ‘water stress’ versus exposure to ‘Overall Water Risk’.
Natcap applies consistent methodologies across for example, water, forests, commodities and biodiversity-sensitive locations.
Consistency enables:
Direct comparison across ecosystem services
Clearer ranking of material risks
More coherent portfolio-level prioritisation
Freely available tools are well suited to early TNFD phases, particularly Locate and initial Assess.
The TNFD, however, requires organisations not only to identify risks, but to prioritise them and explain their materiality.
Granular, transparent and consistent methodologies strengthen:
Internal confidence
Audit defensibility
Credibility with investors and regulators
High-level tools are appropriate when:
Beginning TNFD exploration
Conducting high-level portfolio screening
Identifying potential hotspots
More granular assessment becomes important when:
Site-level or sourcing data exists
Mitigation resources must be allocated
TNFD disclosure is being prepared
Decisions must withstand board, investor or regulatory scrutiny
Screening tools have accelerated progress in nature risk awareness. That contribution is significant.
For many organisations, the next step is moving from screening to prioritisation, from awareness to accountability from averages to site-specific clarity.
When risks are precisely located, scored, quantified by magnitude and consistently compared, leaders can:
Allocate capital more effectively
Prioritise mitigation with evidence
Reduce governance uncertainty
Defend decisions with confidence
Better data supports not only reporting, but also decision-making and exposure to nature-related risks.
Explore our platform to learn how we can help you generate decision-ready insights.