How to Build a Nature Strategy: A Practical Guide for Fashion Brands

Why nature strategy has become unavoidable

"Nature strategy" has moved from a voluntary best-practice framework to a near-mandatory disclosure requirement in under three years. TNFD recommendations, CSRD ESRS E4 biodiversity reporting (mandatory for Wave 2 companies from FY2027), and the Science Based Targets for Nature (SBTN) all require the same foundational work: understanding where your business depends on and impacts nature, and setting credible targets to reduce those impacts.

For fashion brands, the nature case is unusually direct. Cotton is a chemically intensive crop with well-documented regional pesticide and water impacts. Leather drives deforestation in the Amazon and Cerrado. Viscose is linked to ancient forest destruction in Canada, Russia, and Indonesia. Synthetic dyes pollute rivers across South and Southeast Asia. The sector's nature footprint is deep, diverse, and traceable — which means it is both a significant liability and a manageable one.

Step 1: Materiality scoping

Before you can assess nature risk, you need to know which commodities and geographies drive your exposure. Start with your sourcing spreadsheet — commodity names, countries of origin, volumes, and tier-one supplier names.

Map each commodity to its primary nature pressure dimensions. Cotton's biggest impacts are water use and chemical pollution. Leather's biggest impacts are deforestation and species loss. Viscose is primarily a deforestation issue. Wool drives land degradation and water stress. Polyester generates water pollution and climate emissions.

This gives you a rough materiality map — which commodity-pressure combinations are most relevant — before you've run a single number. It also tells you where data gaps are most critical to fill.

Step 2: Pressure assessment

For each commodity-location pair, assess the severity of each nature pressure dimension. A robust assessment uses:

• Global Forest Watch — deforestation alerts within 50km of supplier sites
• GBIF and IUCN Red List — species occurrence data and threatened species counts in production regions
• Aqueduct Water Risk — water stress levels (baseline and projected 2030/2050) in sourcing geographies
• ENCORE — ecosystem service dependencies and impact drivers by industry sector
• Fashion on Climate / Textile Exchange commodity emissions intensities — a sector-average GHG-intensity band per commodity, rated Low / Medium / High. This is a materiality signal, not a quantified footprint: your actual scope 3 tonnage is a separate carbon-accounting exercise (ESRS E1)

The output is a six-column pressure heatmap: one column per dimension (Land use & conversion, Species, Water use, Water pollution, Soil & chemicals, Climate), one row per commodity-origin combination, each cell rated Critical / High / Medium / Low. Land is worth rating as two things and reporting the worse: conversion — natural ecosystem turned into production land — and degradation — quality lost on land already in production. Nothing is deforested for cashmere, but the Mongolian steppe is overgrazed, and a single “deforestation” column tells that brand to look for felled trees it will never find.

If you don't have site-level geolocation data — and most brands don't — country-level and production-region benchmarks can fill the gaps. These should be clearly flagged as proxies with an amber confidence indicator. A proxy-heavy assessment is still vastly more useful than no assessment.

Step 3: Action prioritisation

The pressure heatmap tells you where your exposure sits. The action list tells you what to do about it. A good action list has:

• A specific, measurable action (not "improve transparency" but "require GPS coordinates from all Brazilian leather T1 suppliers")
• The pressure dimension it addresses
• A timeline: Short term (0–18 months), Medium term (18 months–3 years), Long term (3+ years)
• A measurable KPI (% certified by volume, m³ water per kg, ha under regenerative management)
• A mitigation tier: Avoid > Reduce > Restore & Regenerate > Transform

Prioritisation should weight severity first, then data availability (actions you can actually implement), then cost-effectiveness. A Critical deforestation gap with a clear certification pathway ranks higher than a Medium water-stress gap that requires capital investment in supplier infrastructure.

Step 4: Target setting

Targets are what separate a nature strategy from a nature assessment. Without targets, you have a risk report. With targets, you have a strategy.

A credible nature target has four components: a metric, a base year, a target year, and a level of ambition grounded in either sector benchmarks or science-based guidance.

For fashion brands, the most commonly set targets are: percentage of high-risk commodities certified to a credible standard by a given year; percentage of supplier sites with geolocation coverage; water intensity reduction per kg of product; and percentage recycled or certified content in specific fibre categories.

The Science Based Targets for Nature (SBTN) framework provides a more rigorous methodology for land, freshwater, and ocean targets. If you are disclosing under TNFD or CSRD ESRS E4, aligning your targets with SBTN significantly strengthens their credibility.

Step 5: Governance and disclosure

A nature strategy is only as strong as the governance behind it. At minimum, you need: board-level accountability for nature-related risks and targets; a sustainability committee with oversight of the action plan; and a disclosure process that reports progress annually.

Under CSRD ESRS E4, disclosure must cover your policies, targets, actions, and metrics in a standardised format. Under TNFD, disclosure follows the four-pillar structure: Governance, Strategy, Risk Management, Metrics and Targets. Both frameworks reward the same underlying rigour.

The most important principle is provenance: every quantitative claim in your disclosure should trace back to a named data source. Investors and regulators are increasingly scrutinising the methodology behind nature disclosures, not just the headline numbers.

What to do when your data is incomplete

The honest answer is: start anyway. Every brand we work with begins with incomplete data. The value of a nature strategy is not the precision of the first version — it is the process of identifying where the gaps are and building a roadmap to close them. An assessment built on country-level proxies, clearly labelled, is publishable and useful. It also tells you exactly where to direct your supplier engagement budget.

The brands that will have credible CSRD E4 disclosures ready for FY2027 are the ones that started building their data infrastructure in 2025 and 2026 — not the ones waiting for perfect data before they begin.