Disclosure is not a decision: What the TNFD 2026 Status Report tells us about why nature reporting isn't yet moving capital
The headline figures in the 2026 Status Report from the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) are encouraging. More than 1,000 organisations were identified as making at least some TNFD-aligned disclosures, roughly double the number in 2025 (p. 19). Every investor surveyed expressed concern about the effect of nature loss on financial markets, and 96% were concerned about the future financial performance of the funds they manage (p. 10).
That concern is not yet translating consistently into capital allocation. Of the 40 surveyed investors that had carried out a LEAP assessment (TNFD's Locate, Evaluate, Assess and Prepare approach) on some or all of their portfolios, 73% said it informed stewardship and 60% risk management. Only 23% cited capital allocation and 10% portfolio construction (p. 13). TNFD reports that investors want further guidance on measuring and quantifying nature-related dependencies, impacts and risks, and are still testing how to integrate this analysis into core investment processes (p. 13). Adoption is growing, but disclosure on its own is unlikely to shift capital decisions. As the figure below sets out, an assessment built for disclosure answers a different question from the one an investment committee asks.
One framework, three jobs
Most first-generation TNFD work is built for disclosure. Moving capital needs the same evidence taken further: to the asset, into the numbers, and measured over time.
Source: TNFD (2026), TNFD 2026 Status Report, investor survey, p. 13 (LEAP use n = 40; value of first-generation reporting n = 69). tnfd.global/publication/tnfd-2026-status-report. Framework: NatureMetrics.
Investors already see nature as a financial risk
One possible explanation for the gap is that investors do not regard nature as a financial issue, and leave it to sustainability teams as a reputational matter. The survey data does not support this. Asked to select the three main business risks they associate with nature loss, 77% of investors chose physical risks to portfolio companies' operations and value chains, and 72% the broader risk of ecosystem degradation across the economy. Only 15% selected reputational risk (p. 10). Their motivations follow the same pattern: 88% cited understanding the risks in their portfolios, compared with 24% citing international regulation and 15% national regulation (p. 11).
These responses reflect how nature loss reaches a business in practice. For a beverage company, biodiversity loss shows up as a river basin that can no longer reliably supply its bottling plant, or a sugar supplier whose yields fall as soils degrade. Over time, these become higher input costs or lost production.
The same pathway is what makes the risk difficult to price. Each effect runs through a specific location, ecosystem service and part of the business, and it can take years to reach the financial statements. Investors see the risk clearly enough to raise it with companies: 84% of those surveyed already include nature in their stewardship guidance (p. 12). Putting a number on it, however, requires evidence that links ecological change to financial exposure.
Two gaps sit between nature and financial risk
The obstacle is quantification rather than concern. Among respondents assessing nature-related risks (n = 206), 69% cited difficulty measuring and quantifying dependencies and impacts, and the same proportion cited difficulty linking them to risks to the business, including financial effects. Half were unsure which tools, data sets or methodologies to use (p. 16). These findings point to two distinct gaps.
The first is an evidence gap. A company may know that a site depends on water, or that its operations put pressure on nature, but judging how material that is requires data on the condition of nature at that location and how it is changing. For the beverage company, that means knowing whether the river basin supplying its plant is actually drying out.
The second is a translation gap. Even with a clear ecological picture, the company still has to determine what it means for the business: how exposed production is, whether alternative water sources exist, and what disruption would cost over the time horizon that matters to investors.
The two gaps need to be addressed together. Without reliable evidence on the basin, any estimate of financial impact is largely guesswork. With good evidence but no link to the business, the company knows it has a problem but not what it will cost.
The gaps are starting to close
Neither gap has been closed, but the tools to narrow the mare now considerably more practical to deploy.
On the evidence side, companies can move from broad portfolio screening to direct measurement. Geospatial data identifies where nature-related risk is concentrated, and site-level methods such as environmental DNA (eDNA) and bioacoustics establish ecological condition and track change over time. NatureMetrics already combines these layers: portfolio-level assessments bring together state of nature, dependencies and impacts to prioritise sites, which are then validated with direct biodiversity measurement.
The translation gap is harder to close, and much of the work is still done case by case. Linking ecological change to financial effects means combining site-level evidence with data the business already holds on production, input costs and asset values, and modelling how one drives the other. TNFD has expanded its LEAP guidance on measuring dependencies and quantifying risks (p. 16) and says it will continue to develop methods with partners (p. 28). At NatureMetrics, our Nature Strategy team combines site-level evidence with scenario analysis, ecosystem service valuation and natural capital accounting to estimate how changes in nature could affect a company's costs, operational continuity and asset values. We are also developing more standardised approaches to estimating these financial effects, so the analysis can be applied consistently across sites and portfolios rather than rebuilt for each engagement.
The market does not need to solve the pricing question before it acts, because the evidence built today is what will make pricing possible. That means moving from broad exposure assessments to measured evidence of how nature is changing at the sites that matter, and what that change means for the business. Monitoring then closes the loop: repeated measurement shows whether interventions are working and whether the investment case still holds, and feeds into the next decision and the next disclosure. This is the focus of our work at NatureMetrics. The next milestone for TNFD should be measured less by the number of organisations reporting and more by how often nature assessments inform the financial assumptions behind investment decisions.
