TNFD just gave CFOs eleven questions. Most can't answer the first.

Ask your risk team how climate change affects next year's capital plan, and you'll get an answer. Ask the same question about nature, and most finance functions go quiet. TNFD and Accounting for Sustainability just published a guide aimed at closing that gap — eleven questions CFOs should be able to answer, grouped into five themes: relevance, prioritisation, integration into planning, market expectations, and finance-team capability.

The starting premise isn't speculative. A February 2025 survey of corporates engaged by Norges Bank Investment Management found that among companies that consider themselves exposed to nature risk, 43% already see physical risks as financially material, and 27% say the same of transition risks. That's a current-year effect, not a long-horizon scenario.

The guide's central argument is pragmatic: finance teams don't need new infrastructure to start. Climate governance, risk registers, budgeting processes, and scenario analysis can mostly be extended to cover nature rather than rebuilt. TNFD's own LEAP approach — Locate, Evaluate, Assess, Prepare — is offered as the starting methodology, alongside its risk and opportunity registers.

Two examples the guide highlights. GSK's CFO Julie Brown says the company is now applying TNFD's methodology, with its first disclosures due from 2026 on 2025 data. Natura's CFO Silvia Vilas Boas has gone further, building an integrated profit and loss that monetises natural, human, and social capital alongside financial capital — describing sustainability, in her words, as “not a trade-off, but a core driver of performance.”

The regulatory track is moving in parallel. The ISSB is targeting an Exposure Draft of new nature-related disclosure requirements — building on TNFD's framework, covering ground IFRS S1 and S2 don't already reach — timed to COP17 this month.

For financial institutions, the relevant question isn't only whether your own finance function can answer these eleven questions. It's whether the companies in your loan book and investment portfolio can. If 43% of exposed corporates already report a financial effect from nature, and your institution can't locate that exposure across the portfolio, the gap isn't academic — it's at your door.

How many of your top-20 counterparties could answer TNFD's first question?

Source: TNFD and Accounting for Sustainability (A4S), ‘Asking Better Questions on Nature for CFOs’; Gjerde, Sautner, Wagner & Wegerich, ‘Corporate Nature Risk Perceptions’, ECGI Working Paper Series in Finance No. 1056/2025 (forthcoming, Review of Finance); IFRS Foundation, ‘ISSB welcomes TNFD support for nature-related disclosure’, November 2025.