Global agribusiness turns biodiversity into business value

Earth Blox enabled a global consultancy to deliver biodiversity risk insights for one of the world’s largest agribusinesses. Aligned with the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework, Earth Blox provided a scalable, no-code solution to assess ecosystem sensitivity, dependency, and impact across thousands of farm sites — turning biodiversity into business value.

“We found those farms with the highest level of biodiversity also had the highest yields. That gave them a business case to protect and invest in nature. That’s not just about compliance – that’s performance,” said Mike Mason, Chief Operating Officer at Earth Blox.

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The challenge

One of the world’s largest agribusinesses faced a dual challenge: they needed to meet emerging TNFD requirements while also gaining a deeper understanding of how biodiversity affected their operations. The goal was not just to report on risks, but to build a foundation for a broader nature strategy — one that could assess dependencies, sensitivities, and impacts across their assets and identify high-priority areas for action.

They partnered with a global consultancy to support the analysis of biodiversity and climate risks across thousands of farm sites. However, the consultancy's existing GIS tools struggled to manage the complexity and volume of data, leading to slow processing, frequent system failures, and fragmented workflows that made timely insight delivery nearly impossible.

Solution

The consultancy needed a solution that could handle complex, multi-site analysis using large volumes of spatial data. Earth Blox was selected for its ability to:

• Rapidly ingest and analyse environmental datasets specific to the country’s ecological context
• Support tailored workflows without the need for additional GIS expertise or software development
• Deliver scalable, traceable insights that could inform both reporting and strategic decision-making

By removing the technical barriers of traditional GIS, Earth Blox enabled the consultancy to focus on insight generation rather than system constraints, making it possible to deliver a more comprehensive, data-driven foundation for the agribusiness’s nature strategy.

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Delivery and implementation

Earth Blox was used to build a structured assessment of ecosystem sensitivity, nature dependencies, and impacts on nature. The consultancy’s technical team used the platform to integrate government and open-access datasets, applying the UNEP-WCMC Nature Risk Profile methodology in alignment with TNFD’s LEAP framework.

Key components of the delivery included:

• Custom spatial workflows tailored to the agribusiness’s asset footprint
• Integration of diverse environmental and nature-related datasets relevant to the local context
• A database capturing ecosystem sensitivity, dependency, and impact scores
• Outputs delivered as ranked site scores and prioritisation tables, enabling business stakeholders to take action without needing to interpret raw spatial data

This allowed the consultancy to generate high-quality insights at scale, while maintaining the flexibility to adapt the methodology to other sectors or regions in future engagements.

Results

Earth Blox enabled the consultancy to deliver deeper, more actionable insights — faster and at scale. For the agribusiness, this translated into:

• Identifying revenue-driving insights from nature and climate data
• Prioritising investments in biodiversity restoration and protection to maximise yield and resilience
• Rolling out a repeatable assessment framework that can be adapted to other countries or subsidiaries
• Achieving alignment with TNFD, supported by traceable, auditable data
• Reframing sustainability as a strategic driver of optimisation and growth — not just a compliance obligation