A decade ago, the scale and systemic nature of environmental risk had yet to be fully recognised by much of the business world.

Major corporations had environmental footprints on par with sovereign nations — emissions from some Global 500 companies were almost equal to those of the USA and EU combined. Yet at the time, most corporate leaders hadn’t been trained to manage impacts of that scale.

It was within this context of corporate oversight that Dr Genevieve Patenaude, then an academic colleague of mine, and now CEO of Earth Blox, emerged as a compelling visionary. Writing in the journal Nature in 2010, she warned that meeting the complex managerial challenges brought by global environmental change required expert knowledge that was only "moderately addressed" in business education. Genevieve highlighted the immense influence of business schools, noting that nearly 40 per cent of S&P 500 CEOs hold an MBA. She argued that the complexity and potential impact of these environmental realities might rival past disruptive forces like globalisation and the information technology revolution.  

Such foresight established a vital truth: if corporations were to shift their impact, the knowledge needed to manage those risks had to be seamlessly integrated into strategic decision-making. In those early days, she had already identified that it would not be long before the rapid increase in data availability (from increasing field surveys, drones, and satellites) would change how we measure and manage that impact.

The materiality of nature risk

Today, the systemic threat Genevieve identified is primarily manifesting as a nature-related financial risk. Nature degradation is no longer a distant social responsibility issue; it is actively driving financial risk. According to the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, global economic losses from the disruption of industries dependent on ecosystem services could reach $5 trillion.

Nature degradation is already disrupting operations, increasing costs, and exposing value chains to volatility. This is what’s driving action in the boardroom — not just the pressure to report, but the need to protect performance. Regulatory frameworks like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) are setting clearer expectations, but the real imperative comes from understanding how nature risk translates into business risk. Whatever language is used — climate, biodiversity, or resilience — the outcome is the same: material impacts on profitability and long-term value

What is recognised as the immediate challenge is visibility: most banks and large firms lack the necessary tools to identify where their nature-related exposures lie, resulting in manual, patchy analyses that simply cannot scale across global operations or complex supply chains.

Nature and climate data: Turning risk into resilience

The shift toward meaningful insight is being enabled by a new era of environmental data. Today, we have access to petabytes of authoritative nature and climate data from trusted sources like NASA, the European Space Agency, and the UN Environment Programme. But transforming that data into decision-ready insight still requires the right tools — ones that simplify complexity and fit seamlessly into existing workflows.

This is where Earth Blox provides the critical infrastructure for executive risk management. Earth Blox is a cloud-based platform that turns complex nature and climate data into decision-ready insights. It accelerates user adoption and operational efficiency by removing the need for specialist GIS expertise and complex manual data wrangling. By utilising a drag-and-drop interface and pre-built workflows aligned with compliance requirements like the TNFD, CSRD, and the European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), Earth Blox allows teams to perform sophisticated analysis in minutes, not months, with results that can feed directly into existing business systems.

Crucially, the platform provides tailored insights for every stage of financial decision-making, including pre-boarding risk screening, embedding scores into loan terms, monitoring shifts in exposure over time, and assessing legacy risk during divestment.

Real-world risk mitigation in action

Leading enterprises are leveraging the accelerated capability that Earth Blox gives them to build resilience and gain portfolio-wide visibility:‍

Building resilience in finance and agriculture

Lloyds Banking Group partnered with Earth Blox to produce the UK’s largest dynamic nature map of farmland, giving visibility across all 46,000 farming clients — a significant leap beyond the estimated 1.5 percent previously covered by on-site assessments. Geospatial analysis based on regularly updated government datasets revealed specific vulnerabilities, including the locations of all farms with the highest projected drought risk. This dynamic risk assessment allows Lloyds to target finance and support, like rainwater harvesting measures, precisely where it will build the strongest resilience for farmers and communities. Learn more about our work with Lloyd’s here.‍

Financial institutions scaling oversight

Another global bank, Citi, used Earth Blox to accelerate biodiversity impact risk reporting across its supply chain facilities, reducing analysis time from two months to one hour. This capability now allows the bank to efficiently assess thousands of facilities (with the capacity to scale to millions), ensuring compliance with TNFD standards and supporting audit readiness. Learn more in Citi’s report: Nature: Sustainability’s next frontier.

Retail supply chain visibility

Sustainable fashion brand Everlane recognised a strategic gap regarding nature risks (such as biodiversity loss and water scarcity) in materials like cotton and wool. Working with their consulting partner, Pure Strategies, they used Earth Blox to overlay known and proxy sourcing regions with spatial data on ecosystem intactness and water stress. This effort yielded the company’s first-ever biodiversity-related risk maps. The visualisation of ecosystem pressures transformed fragmented data into informed, strategic conversations with suppliers, demonstrating a critical shift toward proactive supply chain management. Read the case study here: Everlane maps nature risk to inform sustainable sourcing strategy.

Operationalising value in agribusiness

A global agribusiness used Earth Blox to conduct scalable assessments of ecosystem sensitivity, dependency, and impact across thousands of farm sites, aligning with TNFD requirements. The analysis revealed that farms with the highest level of biodiversity also reported the highest yields. This insight reframes nature stewardship not as a cost of compliance, but as a direct strategic driver of operational performance and business value. Read the case study here: Global agribusiness turns biodiversity into business value.

Proactive management is the new leadership

The era of relying on backwards-looking, manual analysis is over. Over a decade ago, Genevieve argued that businesses needed to proactively quantify and manage their nature risks, and by creating Earth Blox, she has given them quick and simple access to the sophisticated analytics required to achieve this. If your organisation relies on ecosystem services — from clean water and fertile soil, to regulated temperatures and raw materials — you are exposed to material financial risk, whatever language you choose to describe it.

To transition from reactive reporting, on a site-by-site basis, to proactive risk management across the entire business, you must integrate nature insights into your core strategy.

Contact us today to understand how Earth Blox can help your organisation assess and act upon your critical nature impacts and dependencies across your entire portfolio.

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Iain H Woodhouse is Knowledge and Outreach Lead at Earth Blox and Professor of Applied Earth Observation at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in active remote sensing, with over 27 years experience in academia and industry, and more than 100 publications. Iain has advised multiple UK government agencies on EO strategy and is former Chair of the UK Space Agency’s EO Advisory Committee.