The nature blind spot in your risk register

Shannon Gormley, sustainability consultant, EKOS

What would you do if one of the most significant gaps in your risk register was not something you had overlooked, but something no one had ever thought to put there?

That is the position many boards are in with nature. Not because the question has been considered and parked, but because no one sitting around the table has been accountable for raising it. The water availability your supply chain depends on, the soil conditions your agricultural inputs require and the ecological exposure your insurer is already factoring into your next renewal – these are material business risks that may never have made it onto the register. Not because they are unimportant, but because the governance structures that would surface them simply do not exist yet.

Sydney Straver, managing director, &BLOOM Sustainability & ESG

In a business environment where more than half of global GDP carries meaningful dependence on natural systems, that is a gap with potential financial consequences.

Think about what happened to businesses that had never mapped their energy dependencies before the supply shocks of earlier this year. The exposure was always there – it simply had not been stress-tested.

Nature sits in the same position today. It is the kind of risk that feels abstract until it is not, and by the time it shows up in your costs, your options have already narrowed. A useful analogy is this: a good chef does not design a menu and then check whether the ingredients are available. They understand what the season offers and build from there. Businesses that understand their natural dependencies work the same way – they make better decisions earlier because they know what they are actually working with.

In &BLOOM’s work with organisations across Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the most consistent finding is not that leaders have weighed this up and decided it can wait. It is that the question has genuinely never been put to them.

Nature gets filed under ‘environment’, handed to the HSE function and the conversation stops there. A board approves investment in a water-stressed region without pricing in supply risk. A global customer starts asking questions about ecological dependencies that no one in the organisation can answer. An insurer quietly adjusts its pricing while the renewal goes through on autopilot.

None of it arrives labelled as a nature problem. It arrives as higher costs, as a lost contract, as a financing conversation the business was not ready to have.

It also arrives as a question from Europe. The EU has spent 2026 scaling back its own mandatory biodiversity reporting rules, but the companies still in scope are precisely the ones with the largest supply chains and land footprints. They are now pushing nature-related data requests down to their suppliers, New Zealand exporters included, so they can meet their own regulatory obligations. That pressure does not wait for New Zealand to introduce equivalent requirements of its own.

"Tourism businesses up and down the country are working to protect and restore the places they operate in, often quietly, as part of doing business and making a contribution to the communities they are part of. TIA’s role is to support these businesses through the Tourism Sustainability Commitment and our work with DoC to make tourism and conservation natural partners. Our goal is to support the industry so it becomes easier to do and more consistent across the industry, rather than something individual operators have to figure out on their own.”

– Rebecca Ingram, CEO of Tourism Industry New Zealand

The organisations building long-term resilience are not approaching this as a reporting obligation – they are approaching it as a strategic one.

In practice, that means working towards a nature-positive strategy: not simply minimising harm, but committing to a measurable point at which the business’s activities leave nature better off than a defined baseline – halting and reversing loss, rather than managing its rate of decline.  

When you understand where your business depends on natural systems, what emerges is not just a risk register entry but a clearer picture of where you are exposed, where your competitors are equally in the dark and where early action can strengthen resilience and market position.

Stronger input security, better financing terms, supply chain transparency that holds up when customers push on it – these are outcomes that happen to require understanding nature to unlock. For organisations ready to go further, that means moving from mapping into action: biodiversity credits, ecosystem restoration and nature-based investment are among the tools available. 
 
It is worth being precise here: a biodiversity credit is not an offset. It does not cancel out damage done elsewhere, and it does not create a licence to keep degrading nature in one place because you have paid to restore it in another.

A credit represents a genuine, additional contribution to protecting or restoring nature. In a corporate setting, it is generally used alongside reducing your organisation’s own impacts, not instead of doing so, to demonstrate a credible commitment to mitigation. 

“Cacao is entirely dependent on the health of growing regions, so ecological resilience isn’t a side issue for us, it’s core to supply security. That’s why protecting those ecosystems is a strategic priority, not a reporting exercise.”

– Lucy Bennetto, CEO and founder of Bennetto Natural Foods

Before your next board meeting, consider these questions:  

1. Does your next capital expenditure or acquisition paper say anything about ecological dependency – not just carbon, but water, land, and the natural systems your inputs rely on?  
2. Has anyone checked whether your insurer is already pricing this into your next renewal, and whether your organisation is well or poorly positioned as a result?  
3. Who, specifically, is accountable for bringing this to the board as a strategic question rather than an annual update?  

The shift from risk to resilience does not begin with a disclosure programme or a new framework. It begins with someone around the table who has the mandate to ask the question – and the honesty to act on the answer before the cost of not doing so makes the decision for them. 

Shannon Gormley and Sydney Straver will unpack this at the IoD Leadership Conference in September. Join us if this is a conversation your board has not yet had because that is exactly where to start. Register here.