How to stop buying nature strategies that don’t work

Nature risk is business risk. Water shortages stop production, degraded land weakens supply chains, habitat destruction delays approvals, and weak offsets become expensive regrets. While ecosystem decline shows up as flood, fire, and heat exposure, insurance pressure rises, and capital sits in the wrong place.

This is not sustainability theatre, but the reality of throughput, capex, approvals, suppliers, financing and reputation.

Boards have noticed. Almost overnight, nature has become a standing item on agendas. But urgency is not maturity, and the challenge of nature strategies has moved much faster than the speed at which organisations buy them.

For a long time, nature strategies could get by on a narrative: a few commitments, some framework alignment, a materiality exercise, a map of dependencies and impacts, and a vision statement about becoming nature positive. Thankfully, that world is changing, and the next generation of nature strategy must do more by helping boards' decisions, driving action at the site level, and equipping reporting teams with evidence they can defend.

Despite that heavier load, the buying model remains oddly old-fashioned. Organisations still buy nature advice in pieces of advisory, ecology, sector and assurance. We see this old model failing us (and nature) in two familiar ways:

• The first is the slide-deck snare: The high-gloss slides soar in the boardroom with the right language, framework, number of chevrons and a custom font. Then someone asks: “Hey, will this actually work on site?” Suddenly, the strategy loses altitude as it deals with water, habitat, approvals, offsets, access, suppliers and costs.
• The second is quadrat quicksand: This is the opposite trap, and in some ways more tragic. The work is careful, real, and credible with field notes, GPS points, species lists, defensible methods and people who know the difference between a desktop screen and a difficult site. Then it burrows into Appendix G, where good evidence goes to avoid eye contact with the board. The ecology is strong, but the business impact isn’t.

We think (and hope) both models are running out of road.

The three tests of a grown-up nature strategy

We see a better way and we think it is already within your reach. In our view, any nature strategy worth buying must pass three tests.

• The boardroom test: would the board sign it off? Does the strategy give decision-makers crisp recommendations, clear trade-offs, credible costs and a sharp view of where value is exposed? If it cannot support decisions on priorities, funding or accountability, it is not board ready.
• The site test: would the site team use it? Can the plan be approved, costed, procured, delivered and measured? Would the engineer, planner, farm manager or asset manager recognise the assumptions as credible? If not, it will faceplant in the mud.
• The audit test: would the evidence survive scrutiny? We see the era of soft nature claims ending. Climate reporting has shown how quickly voluntary language becomes board accountability, assurance preparation and scrutiny. We see nature heading the same way, and it’s better to build the evidence trail from the start through baselines, assumptions, data sources, controls, methods and decisions, rather than reverse-engineering it later in “final_v1.3_finalfinal.xls”.

The missing ingredient is usually not talent. It’s the baker.

So, what have we learned? A mature nature strategy needs the right ingredients: someone who can speak boardroom, someone who understands nature, and someone who has stared down an auditor before. We know, this is hardly news.

The insight is not that these roles are needed, but instead that they need to be folded together. Without that, you do not have a strategy, you have ingredients on the bench.

A cake is not made by placing flour, sugar, butter and eggs side by side. Someone has to know the recipe, work the ingredients together, get air into the mixture and judge when the middle is cooked. Nature strategy is the same, and the ingredients only become useful when someone owns the bake.

If your nature strategy is delivered by consultants, the clearest sign of a real baker is one shared Profit and Loss (P&L). Without it, integration is usually just words on a slide. With a shared P&L, the ecologists, advisers, sector specialists and evidence owners are tethered together.

That point should not be missed. A shared P&L means the team is not merely assembled for the proposal. It means they were built to deliver together. The specialists know each other’s methods, workflows and blind spots. They’ve argued before, fixed gaps and know each other’s kids. Most importantly, they are rewarded for making the whole strategy work.

We have all seen the alternative: three logos neatly aligned on the proposal slide. One firm owns the board story, another the field evidence, and a third the disclosure. The pitch promises an “integrated team”, yet the behind-the-scenes drama to pull the proposal together tells a very different story: fee squabbles, late-night stitching, scope fog, but just enough alignment to get the bid into the tender box.

That friction does not disappear when the project starts. It multiplies.

Separate P&Ls create separate incentives, and those incentives create seams that a nature strategy cannot afford.

Four blunt questions for serious buyers

So, what is a buyer to do? In our view, the power is already in your hands and before buying your next nature strategy, we encourage you to ask four simple questions.

1. Where’s your ecologist?
   Name the qualified person shaping the nature judgement: an ecologist, botanist, zoologist, conservation biologist, environmental scientist or equivalent, instead of a “nature lead” whose natural habitat is the workshop.
2. Where’s your board whisperer?
   Name the person who has stood in front of boards and turned technical evidence into value, risk, capital, governance and accountability.
3. Where’s your sector specialist?
   Name the person who understands the operating system. For mining, a mine planner, tailings specialist, water expert, closure specialist or approvals lead. For agriculture, an agronomist, soil scientist, hydrologist or supply-chain specialist. The role changes by sector; the test does not. Look for the specialist, not a generalist resprayed as “Sector Subject Matter Expert”.
4. Where’s your shared P&L owner?
   This is the big one. Show that ecology, advisory, sector expertise and evidence quality sit under one accountable P&L. If ownership is split across firms, or the same firm across several P&Ls, the seams are visible before the work begins.

It’s time to buy nature strategy like it matters

The issue is not whether nature matters, but whether organisations are buying their nature strategies in ways that reflect its importance. A strategy expected to guide capital, approvals, site decisions, disclosure and scrutiny cannot be built from disconnected workstreams and hopeful handovers.

The change required is simple, but not trivial. Buyers need to test for the right capabilities and then test harder for integration. Who understands nature? Who can translate it for the board? Who knows the operating system? Who owns the evidence? And who is accountable for the cake? Those simple asks will raise the bar. That is the LEAP we think nature strategies need to make.

Nature strategy has grown up. The way organisations buy it now needs to catch up.