TNFD Early Adopters – marking an important milestone for the TNFD

Organisations supported by Global Canopy’s TNFD pilots named among Early Adopters

The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) has announced the first 320 businesses and financial institutions to sign up as TNFD Early Adopters.

Building on the release of the TNFD’s Final Recommendations last year, the Early Adopters announcement is another significant milestone for the TNFD. For the first time, companies and financial institutions globally will officially start putting the TNFD recommendations into practice as part of their ‘business as usual’ processes.

Global Canopy is a founding partner of the TNFD, and was an official piloting organisation for the TNFD prior to the launch of the TNFD Final Recommendations in September 2023. We continue to provide technical expertise to the TNFD, and to build capacity among companies and financial institutions, preparing them to get started with adopting the TNFD’s recommendations.

Among the TNFD Early Adopters are several companies and financial institutions that Global Canopy has supported in recent years through programmes to pilot the TNFD’s recommendations ahead of the final release. These include AECOM, JGP, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Olam Agri, Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG), Rabobank, Schroders, United Overseas Bank, and Vitasoy.

“Having been part of the TNFD since its inception, Global Canopy is pleased to see companies and financial institutions in their hundreds, throughout the world – including several that we have supported through piloting programmes – become Early Adopters of the TNFD. The TNFD highlights the importance of robustly assessing and disclosing nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities. Nature loss poses some of the greatest risks to humanity. Global Canopy strives to end tropical deforestation and we believe that assessments of deforestation exposure are a great place for businesses to get started.”

Andrew Boulding, Engagement and Piloting Lead – Nature-Related Finance, Global Canopy

The interface between deforestation, the TNFD’s recommendations, and Global Canopy’s tools

Global Canopy has developed tools and datasets to encourage organisations to assess and act on deforestation within their value chains. The indicators used to assess financial institutions and companies on their deforestation and human rights commitments as part of Global Canopy’s Forest 500 are pertinent to the TNFD’s Final Recommendations. Global Canopy tools, including Forest IQ, Trase and ENCORE, can support financial institutions with the TNFD’s LEAP approach. And detailed guidance on deforestation assessment processes, such as Global Canopy’s Deforestation Free Finance Roadmap and Due Diligence guidance, can help financial institutions undertake granular assessments of deforestation risks and move towards deforestation-free portfolios.

Find out more about deforestation in the context of the TNFD, and how Global Canopy tools provide support, in this Global Canopy website article.

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Supporting MUFG Bank, Olam, Rabobank, Schroders and United Overseas Bank to understand the challenges and opportunities with assessing nature-related issues across palm oil supply chains

In 2022, Dutch multinational banking and financial services organisation Rabobank, global food and agri-business company Olam, and Japanese banking and financial services organisation Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (specifically MUFG Bank), British multinational asset manager Schroders and Singaporean multinational bank United Overseas Bank participated in a Global Canopy-led, TNFD-supported palm oil pilot, designed to gather early insights into practices used in the assessment, measurement and disclosure of nature-related risks and opportunities related to palm oil, as well as common barriers and challenges experienced during the process. The palm oil sector was selected for piloting due to its high nature-related risk exposure and expected high levels of maturity in relation to sustainability and risk reporting. Insights from the pilot fed into the development of the TNFD Final Recommendations.

Read the report on the pilot programme featuring MUFG Bank, Olam Agri, Rabobank, Schroders and United Overseas Bank, Piloting the TNFD beta framework in the palm oil sector.

Read the report

TNFD’s proof of concept pilot with Rabobank and Vitasoy explored the challenges and opportunities in assessing nature-related issues across soy supply chains

Rabobank and Vitasoy were among the organisations to work with Global Canopy and the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) in an initial pilot study to support the development of the first beta version of the TNFD recommendations, which was released in March 2022. The study was designed to identify practical considerations the TNFD would need to take into account in order to be practically implementable by businesses and financial institutions. Rabobank and Vitasoy were among several organisations involved with soy supply chains that tested a high-level exploratory framework for feasibility in its practical application as part of the pilot study.

Read the report, featuring Rabobank and Vitasoy: Testing a nature-related risk framework in the consumer staples sector.

Read the report

Testing the TNFD’s LEAP approach with AECOM, JGP Asset Management and PIDG

AECOM, JGP Asset Management and PIDG are among the organisations Global Canopy supported to assess their nature-related risks and opportunities as part of a 2023 programme to pilot the TNFD’s recommendations prior to launch in September 2023. AECOM, JGP Asset Management and PIDG were supported by technical expert consultancies Nature-based Insights, Frontierra and The Biodiversity Consultancy respectively. As part of the pilot programme, they undertook assessments of their nature-related issues in line with the TNFD’s voluntary assessment approach, LEAP (Locate, Evaluate, Assess, Prepare). As part of this approach, organisations are expected to: locate their interface with nature; evaluate their dependencies and impacts on nature; assess their nature-related risks and opportunities; and prepare to report on their material nature-related issues. The LEAP approach is a key tool to help organisations report in line with the TNFD’s recommendations.

Find out more in this Global Canopy website article.

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