Putting Nature in the Boardroom

As global businesses race to understand and reduce their impact on nature, NatureMetrics is taking a bold step to make biodiversity risk and opportunity visible at scale. The company’s new Portfolio Assessment tool, launching this week, helps organizations assess nature-related risks across hundreds or even thousands of sites quickly and easily.

In a recent conversation with Siddarth Shrikanth, Investment Director at Just Climate, Dimple Patel, CEO of NatureMetrics, described the launch as “a big day” for both the company and its clients.

“We can get them going with their nature reporting from day one,” said Patel. “The barrier to entry is super low. As long as they know where their locations are, they can start getting those insights, start doing the prioritization, start taking action.”

Turning Complexity into Clarity

Businesses have long struggled with fragmented, site-by-site approaches to biodiversity. Portfolio Assessment offers a single, integrated view of an organization’s entire global footprint, bringing together insights from project sites, operations, and supply chains.

“We’re talking hundreds, thousands of sites at the click of a button, all in one dashboard,” explained Patel. “Doing that initial assessment should make it feel less daunting, more tangible, and hopefully just get them rolling in terms of understanding how nature applies to their business.”

The tool builds directly on NatureMetrics’ scientific foundation in environmental DNA (eDNA), which captures genetic traces of species from soil, water, or air samples.

“When you think about AI modeling, typically the quality of the output is linked to the quality of the data,” Patel said. “We are using the highest quality data to power the insights that are coming out of the model.”

If the dashboard flags a potential biodiversity risk, the process does not stop there. “You’re able to then step in, target the eDNA in the right places, and actually validate some of the risks that we have flagged,” Patel added. “We see it as a cycle. This is the entry point for businesses to get into that cycle of testing, monitoring, and reporting.”

A Tool for the Boardroom

 While NatureMetrics’ platform has long served site managers and environmental teams, Portfolio Assessment is designed for strategic decision-makers.

“This really takes that information and puts it in the boardroom,” Patel explained. “Here we’re focusing on anybody that has to think about global operations — chief sustainability officers, chief risk officers, the CFO’s office. When a risk is highlighted, we’re actually able to follow that deep enough to help them allocate capital, change how they’re operating in a certain area, or shift how they approach projects.”

This connection between site-level evidence and executive-level insight is what makes the tool so powerful. It allows sustainability and finance leaders to manage nature risk with the same rigour as they would financial or climate risk.

Built for TNFD, CSRD and Beyond

With frameworks such as TNFD (Taskforce on Nature-relatedFinancial Disclosures) and CSRD (Corporate Sustainability ReportingDirective) becoming key priorities, Portfolio Assessment helps businesses align their reporting and compliance efforts.

“There’s a lot of ambiguity in terms of the metrics that need to be reported,” Patel noted. “What we’ve done is highlight the metrics that we believe are relevant to TNFD and CSRD, explain how they should be used, and how they form part of the reporting.”

The platform also supports other emerging frameworks such asNature Positive and Science Based Targets for Nature (SBTN).Patel described it as “a basket of metrics that can be applied whichever framework they’re working towards.”

Ground-Truth Data, Not Proxies

With biodiversity and nature reporting becoming more common, the number of tools in this space is growing fast. However, Patel believes that the difference lies in data quality and integrity.

“A lot of tools today are estimating what is happening on the ground. They give you a proxy of where your risk might be distributed,” she said. “We don’t want to build proxies. We want to build truly actionable insights. We’re grounding those in ground-truth data, using eDNA as the anchor to make sure all our insights are as high integrity and scientifically credible as they can be.”

From Mining to Finance: Real-World Impact

Portfolio Assessment has already been shaped through collaboration with global industry leaders.

“We’ve built this tool in collaboration with some of the largest corporations in the world,” Patel shared. “We’ve worked with AngloAmerican, BP, Shell, and we’ve taken their insights to really understand what their challenges are and how we can help them address them.”

For mining companies, Patel explained, the tool helps identify and manage risks much earlier in the process.

“Permitting takes up a huge amount of resource and carries a huge amount of risk in terms of business growth,” she said. “We want to pinpoint that as early as possible because it helps them manage risk, allocate spend, and drive more responsible decision-making.”

Beyond extractive industries, the tool can also help businesses manage biodiversity risks in their supply chains.

“Supply chains are hugely vulnerable to invasive species.They cause billions of dollars of damage a year,” Patel said. “If we can help companies see where they’re vulnerable and prioritize where to sample next, they can mitigate those risks before they decimate crops.”

What’s Next for Portfolio Assessment

NatureMetrics is already working to expand the tool’s capabilities, with a focus on species distribution modeling and the integration of nature data into broader climate risk models.

“We believe NatureMetrics has a real competitive advantage here,” Patel said. “We’ve spent 10 years working on species detection across ecosystems. By focusing on modeling, we can think about how nature fits into broader climate risk models, which is incredibly important for insurance and finance.”

The company also plans to refine the portfolio metrics further to help businesses understand ecosystem health in more depth.

“We want to make it super actionable and easy to use,” Patel concluded. “This is about helping businesses understand where nature fits into their decisions and putting nature in the boardroom.”

About Portfolio Assessment

Portfolio Assessment is part of NatureMetrics’ growing suite of tools for biodiversity intelligence. It helps organizations identify and manage nature-related risks across all their operations using the world’s largest eDNA dataset. The tool supports TNFD, CSRD, and other reporting frameworks, providing science-based insights that connect biodiversity performance directly to business strategy. Book your demo today.

‍

‍

‍