INTHEBLACK May 2026 - Magazine - Page 47
“It is about understanding your business model and your value
chain and identifying, as part of your normal risk-identification
process, where you are heavily dependent on nature and
where your impacts on nature could be.”
PATRICK VILJOEN FCPA, CPA AUSTRALIA
and climate interact with each other, and how
we can avoid deploying solutions for one that
have detrimental impacts on the other.”
Disclosure requirements are also evolving.
In the European Union, companies above
a certain size must disclose the risks and
opportunities they identify from social
and environmental issues, as well as
the impacts of their activities on people
and the environment.
While mandatory reporting of this scale
is not currently required in the Asia-Pacific
region, in late 2025 the International
Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB)
announced plans to introduce incremental
disclosure requirements on nature-related
risks and opportunities not already reflected
in IFRS S1 General Requirements for
Disclosure of Sustainability-related
Financial Information and IFRS S2
Climate-related Disclosures.
Drawing on TNFD recommendations
such as the LEAP (Locate, Evaluate, Assess,
Prepare) approach as appropriate, the ISSB
is considering amending existing standards
or introducing a new standard.
“From a standard-setting perspective,
I think the TNFD is robust enough to cover
most concerns and considerations around
nature,” says Viljoen.
However, he warns that nature reporting
will be more complex than climate reporting.
“Climate is a global problem and therefore
needs global solutions. But nature is
extremely location-specific,” Viljoen says.
He notes that nature-related challenges and
solutions can differ dramatically even within
the same country — for example, between
the southern and northern states in Australia.
“This is where I think we are going to find
a lot of complexity,” he says. Viljoen points
out that, unlike carbon, there is not
a standard metric for nature, let alone across
different jurisdictions. “Yes, we might have
an overarching reporting regime, but having
comparable reporting is going to be difficult.”
A marine biologist
inspects bleached
and dead coral around
Lizard Island on the
Great Barrier Reef,
Australia, April 2024.
NATURE SYSTEM
One emerging approach is natural capital
accounting.
Carl Obst, director at IDEEA Group,
works with organisations to develop natural
capital accounts, applying internationally
agreed standards such as the United
Nations System of EnvironmentalEconomic Accounting.
“While having accounting standards
is positive, usually our discussions begin
with ‘Where does your business connect with
nature?’” he says. This starts with describing
the business’s “nature system” by recording
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