When Lloyds Banking Group set out to understand how nature-related pressures affect its UK agriculture lending portfolio, the challenge was not a lack of data — but a lack of consistent, portfolio-wide visibility.

Agriculture and finance are deeply connected. Farming businesses depend on healthy ecosystems, while lenders are exposed to the financial risks that arise when nature degrades. Recognising that these pressures are increasingly financially material, Lloyds worked with Earth Blox to build a clear, comparable view of nature risk and opportunity across its agriculture portfolio.

The result is Farming with nature — a landmark assessment covering 5.1 million hectares of UK farmland, combining farm-level data with Earth observation analytics to show how nature-related pressures and dependencies vary across regions, assets and farming systems.

From fragmented insight to a portfolio-wide view

Before this work, nature-related assessments were often fragmented, region-specific, or difficult to compare at scale. Using Earth Blox, Lloyds was able to move to a consistent, TNFD-aligned view of nature-related risk and opportunity across its UK agriculture lending activity.

This enabled Lloyds to:

• Map exposure and dependence on ecosystem services — including water availability, soil health and pollination — across more than 46,000 agricultural clients.
• Identify regional concentrations of risk, such as drought exposure in East Anglia and low biomass in arable landscapes.
• Pinpoint opportunities for action — including tree planting, water retention and cover cropping — layered with operational and financial data to support more targeted decision-making.
  

“With this data, we can prioritise support to farms most at risk, scale existing solutions and pinpoint cases where innovative products can drive resilience and growth.”
— Andrew Walton, Chief Sustainability Officer, Lloyds Banking Group

This level of insight allows Lloyds to focus attention and support where it matters most — strengthening resilience across the portfolio while supporting long-term value.

Evidence that supports real financial decisions

What once required months of consultant-led analysis can now be delivered in minutes, without compromising rigour. Earth Blox enabled Lloyds to harmonise multiple datasets and apply them consistently across an entire lending portfolio — from arable farmland in the East of England to upland pasture in the North.

Crucially, this approach supports comparability at scale. Rather than assessing a limited subset of farms or regions, Lloyds now has a repeatable way to see where nature-related pressures concentrate, where exposure is highest, and where early intervention can reduce risk.

The insights informed practical, region-specific recommendations — helping farming businesses identify interventions that improve productivity and profitability while protecting natural capital. In turn, this strengthens the resilience of the businesses Lloyds finances.

“These insights are helping us identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and provide actionable, timely guidance for farmers to build resilience.”

From mapping drought vulnerability to informing nature-positive finance, the Lloyds assessment shows how applied nature insight can support forward-looking sustainable finance decisions.

A blueprint for financial institutions

The Farming with nature project is not just an agriculture case study. It demonstrates how financial institutions can integrate nature-related data into real decision-making, at portfolio scale.

For banks preparing for TNFD or seeking to better understand how environmental pressures affect asset value and risk exposure, the Lloyds assessment offers a practical blueprint:
a consistent, scalable approach that links local nature pressures to portfolio-level insight.

At Earth Blox, we work with financial institutions to translate complex environmental data into decision-ready intelligence — helping teams see where nature risk becomes financial risk, compare exposure across assets and regions, and uncover opportunity alongside risk.

If you’re looking to build a nature risk pilot or embed nature intelligence into credit, risk or portfolio processes, we’d be glad to support you. Get started here.

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Read the Lloyds Banking Group report, Farming with nature, to see how portfolio-wide nature insight is shaping sustainable finance decisions.