Aquaculture, agriculture and forestry are among the industries included in the latest round of sector-specific guidance published by the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), aiming to help organisations assess and disclose their impacts and dependencies on nature.
The guidance provides businesses that operate in, and are connected to, the agriculture, aquaculture, forestry, mining, oil and gas, utilities, chemicals and pharmaceuticals sectors with counsel on the key information they will require when conducting their TNFD ‘Locate, Evaluate, Assess, Prepare’ (LEAP) assessments.
The guidance is considered supplementary to the TNFD LEAP approach and is designed to help businesses to gather relevant insights to enable them to disclose on the TNFD’s 14 disclosure recommendations.
Non-profit organisation, Global Canopy, supported the development of the TNFD’s agriculture and aquaculture sector draft guidance. Their nature-related finance director, Marianne Haahr, said that the new sector guidance stands to save organisations “time and money”.
Haahr added: “The sector guidance will enable organisations to pinpoint the critical pieces of research they need to undertake in their direct, upstream and downstream value chains, and data they need to obtain, in order to get started with the TNFD recommendations. It supports businesses and financial institutions with stocktaking the required data that they already possess, and to identify their data gaps as part of their work to start adopting the TNFD.”
Discussion papers
The TNFD has also published two discussion papers aimed at financial institutions, the first of which presents an overview of the current landscape of biodiversity footprinting approaches, including limitations, while setting out six steps to help market participants select and disclose these approaches appropriate for their requirements.
Those steps include:
- Define the purpose
- Select a biodiversity footprinting approach
- Assess the quality and understand the limitations
- Identify complementary approaches
- Run the approach and interpret the results
- Transparently disclose
The second paper, meanwhile, outlines approaches to advanced scenario analysis, building on the TNFD’s guidance on this issue. It is primarily intended for experienced users of scenarios in financial institutions and large multinational companies interested in advanced nature scenario methods, which may include those taking action in anticipation of regulatory stress testing, as has occurred with climate-related risk assessment.
Both papers, as well as the sector-specific disclosure guidance, will be open for market consultation and feedback until 29 March 2024.
