To drive success and growth, businesses of every size around the globe depend on and interact with nature—for natural resources like water and productive soils, ecosystem services like pollination, or as exposure to risks like flooding or wildfires. Business resilience relies on nature’s resilience, yet nature is deteriorating globally and biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history. Every business should aim to better manage its interactions with nature—for the well-being of the planet, but also as a winning business strategy.
Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD)’s nature assessment, the LEAP approach, has emerged as a powerful tool to help businesses better understand their interactions with nature – their dependencies and impacts on nature; and the corresponding risks and opportunities to their business. Nature intelligence—actionable insights on business interactions with nature —is critical to building resilient supply chains and supporting nature-positive economies.
The number of companies tapping nature intelligence is growing, but there's a critical gap: small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs are the backbone of global supply chains; they represent 90% of businesses and more than 50% of employment worldwide. Yet SMEs lack critical expertise, infrastructure, and capacity to leverage nature intelligence to benefit their business. These businesses hold immense collective power to support nature-positive outcomes.
SMEs have no or limited access to the solutions that can provide them nature insights, improve resiliency of their business, and help them more easily complete nature reporting when customers require it. The Nature Intelligence for Business Grand Challenge exists to change that, incentivizing solutions that enable businesses, regardless of their size or location, to access and employ nature intelligence and become part of the solution.
The Mission: Create solutions that enable small and medium-sized enterprises around the world to access nature intelligence and better understand their nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks, and opportunities.
We need breakthrough solutions and tools that help small businesses understand and integrate nature into decision-making—something that's currently too expensive and complex for many companies to do. The solutions should be simple enough for a coffee grower in rural Kenya or a textile manufacturer in Bangladesh to use, generate location-specific insights and practical business advice, and support nature-related reporting when their customers do require it as it becomes more mainstream in business practice.
These solutions should leverage new data tools and technologies and serve users who may not be tech-savvy or have no in-house expertise on environmental issues. The goal is to make nature intelligence accessible and actionable for every business in every sector worldwide.
The Nature Intelligence for Business Grand Challenge seeks audacious yet practical innovations that empower SMEs to overcome critical resource, knowledge, infrastructure, and capacity constraints to effectively identify and assess their nature-related issues consistent with the TNFD LEAP approach. Solutions should streamline SMEs' processes for identifying and evaluating nature-related dependencies and impacts. Solutions should be forward looking with the potential to help facilitate SMEs' integration into larger corporations' nature-related value-chain reporting obligations.
Learn more about eligibility, terms of participation, and what we’re looking for in the Innovator Handbook.
The Nature Intelligence for Business Grand Challenge is funded by the Government of Germany’s International Climate Initiative (IKI) and run by Conservation X Labs, in conjunction with Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
We're inviting new collaborators and additional funders to join our challenge coalition. As a collaborator, you will play a pivotal role in strengthening SMEs' ability to manage their nature-related issues for the resilience of their business as well as the planet. You'll also solidify your standing in the international community as a pioneer in sustainable, nature-positive business.
Email us at natureintelligence@conservationxlabs.org to join the coalition.