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 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).
If you'd like to get in touch, you can reach us at natureintelligence@conservationxlabs.org.
The Advisory Group plays a pivotal role in ensuring that the Nature Intelligence for Business Grand Challenge generates practical, reliable, scalable, and market-relevant innovations that meet the real needs of corporate sustainability and supply-chain systems. They advise on the Challenge implementation, provide expert review & oversight, and champion and enable broader adoption of proven solutions.
Seema Arora
Ms. Seema Arora pioneered the creation of services on Sustainable Development within CII. Her journey with CII began with engaging Indian Industry towards the run up to the Earth Summit in 1992.
Seema Arora works with industry to build evidence & the business case for industry to invest in Sustainability and Climate Action. She works with Industry and Government to develop policy instruments and curate collaborative initiatives across sector and stakeholders. She has created and incubated innovative alliances such as India CEO Forum on Clean Air, CII Climate Action Charter, India Plastics Pact, India Business and Biodiversity Initiative, and India Business and Disability Network etc.
Her portfolios in CII include Sustainable Development, Climate and Energy Transition, Circular Economy, Diversity, and inclusion.
Seema Arora has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Delhi University. She is a part of the Asian Impact Leaders Network co-created by AVPN & Rockefeller Foundation. She has thirty plus years of experience in the field of Sustainable Development.
Nikita Asthana
Nikita is a sustainability leader in the food and agriculture sector, advocating system transformation at the intersection of climate, nature, and finance. She leads the global Sustainability and Operations Finance teams at Olam Agri and chairs the advisory group for EU co-funded Project A-track. A CFA charterholder and INSEAD MBA, she champions nature-positive outcomes, a just transition, and inclusive leadership in shaping a resilient, future-fit global food system.
Driven by a deep commitment to food and nutrition security, Nikita is exploring angel investing in a personal capacity to support early-stage ventures that are reimagining our food systems. She seeks to back founders building solutions that make nutritious food more accessible, sustainable and equitable - translating her professional expertise into direct impact at the grassroots level of innovation.
Sean Breyer
Sean Breyer is a veteran geologist/geographer and the Director of Esri's ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. As such, he oversees the world's foremost collection of global geographic information for the planet. Sean and his team curate billions of dollars' worth of satellite and geospatial data from the largest data providers in the world, including NASA, NOAA, the European Space Agency, the UK Met Office, and many more.
Since joining Esri in 2011, Sean has supported some of the most challenging issues on the planet, from engineering and maintaining the Johns Hopkins Covid Dashboard to developing the first-ever global, consistent ecosystem maps for terrestrial, marine, and coastal environments. Just last year, his team launched https://resilience.climate.gov/ with the White House and NOAA, providing easy-to-use climate data for state and local governments. Sean has been part of the Half-Earth map project with the EO Wilson Foundation since its start 5 years ago. He oversees the technical infrastructure for the Half-Earth map and provides computing capacity and global datasets to scale the project.
Before coming to Esri, Sean worked as Director of Data Services at Rand McNally, South Carolina's GIS Director for the Commerce Department, and as an Envi
Tim Christophersen
Tm Christophersen joined Salesforce as VP, Climate Action in May 2022. Within the global Impact Team, he leads the work on climate and nature action and investments. Tim is based in Denmark. He is the author of ‘Generation Restoration’, a book about restoring nature at planetary scale. Before joining Salesforce, Tim was Head of the ‘Nature for Climate’ Branch at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and led a growing global movement backed by all UN Member States and over 300 partner organizations to ‘prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide’: the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030. Tim is the author of ‘Generation Restoration’, a book about humanity’s relationship with nature. He also previously worked for the European Commission, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Dorothy Maseke
Dorothy is the Head of the African Natural Capital Alliance (ANCA) Secretariat and Africa Lead for Nature Finance & TNFD at FSD Africa, where she leads efforts to drive systemic change in nature finance across the continent. She spearheads the development of innovative financial products, services, and solutions that address nature-related risks while building a high-impact portfolio of projects and partnerships. Dorothy has played a pivotal role in strengthening the nature finance capabilities of African financial institutions, leading key initiatives such as the African pilot of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and, most recently, the continent’s pilot of TNFD’s Nature Data Public Facility. Her work also includes mobilizing capital for nature by developing a pipeline of investible nature-based solutions through accelerators set up by FSD Africa, coordinating nature-related central bank stress testing across African countries, and supporting the development of National Nature Strategies across African countries.
A recognized thought leader in global sustainability, Dorothy serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Natural Capital and has previously represented Africa in international taskforces, including the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) insurer pilot group and the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF). She played a key role in co-creating and launching the Nairobi Declaration on Sustainable Insurance in collaboration with UNEP PSI and FSD Africa, a landmark commitment by African insurance leaders to advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Dorothy’s contributions have earned her multiple accolades, including recognition among Kenya’s Top 40 Under 40 Women, Top 50 Women in Insurance in Africa by the African Insurance Organisation (AIO) in 2022, and Fin-Erth Top 101 Leading Women in Climate (Nature and Biodiversity) Global Awards in 2024.
Dorothy is an author of two books – She Leads, where she covers her leadership journey, as well as Becoming Nature Positive, a book that sets out why Nature Positive is so critical now — and how it can be achieved across business, finance, governance and society.
Priscila Matta
Priscila Matta is Head of Climate, Nature & Regenerative Innovation at Natura, with extensive experience in sustainability. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, and has worked with governmental and non-governmental organizations on environmental conservation, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and the sustainable use of biodiversity.
Yutaka Okano
As Sustainability Director at NEC, Yutaka Okano has initiated and advanced nature and climate initiatives across NEC’s global operations and digital business supply chain. In 2023, he led the development of the IT sector’s first TNFD report, followed by the second and third editions of NEC’s TNFD disclosures. He has extensive hands-on experience applying leading nature-related assessment tools, including ENCORE, IBAT, and WRI Aqueduct, and actively participated in the TNFD Nature Data Public Facility (NDPF) pilot programme as a data user. By leveraging digital technologies, he supports companies across diverse industries in assessing nature-related dependencies and impacts and in accelerating business transformation toward a nature-positive society.
Prior to joining NEC, he spent 14 years at Toyota Motor Corporation as an environmental manager, where he led global programs on biodiversity conservation, water stewardship, and renewable energy. He has extensive experience in environmental impact assessments across a wide range of ecosystems worldwide.
Since 2016, he has also run a startup in rural Japan focused on operating a circular model of agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture that regenerates natural capital. He holds an M.S. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis (2003).
Peter Rabley
Peter Rabley is CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), a membership organization dedicated to using the power of geography and technology to solve problems faced by people and the planet. OGC unlocks value and opportunity for its members through Standards, Innovation, and Policy & Advocacy.
As a technology executive, investor, and geographer, Peter has spent the last thirty years creating and operating geospatial businesses that map the earth to improve lives and protect the resources of our planet. Prior to OGC, Peter Rabley co-founded PLACE, a non-profit data trust that makes mapping more accessible and affordable so that decision makers have the data they need to improve the places around them. Before PLACE, Peter was a venture partner at leading impact investing firm Omidyar Network, where he led the Property Rights initiative.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Arts. Peter graduated from the University of Miami with a B.A. in Geography and Economics and an M.A. in Geography.