The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) conducted a consultation on draft sector guidance papers on Food and agriculture (F&A) and Forestry and paper (F&P).
As an organisation, Climateworks Centre believes that protecting and restoring nature is critical to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions targets because action on climate change and creating resilient ecosystems are deeply intertwined.
Over the past couple of years, we have focused on embedding the concept of natural capital in decision-making, and specifically the measurement and valuation of environmental ‘assets’ as an important enabler of increasing sustainable land use.
This work is being conducted through our Natural Capital Investment Initiative’ a key part of which is the development of the Natural Capital Measurement Catalogue.
Closely aligned with what is outlined in the TNFD, the catalogue provides an entry point for companies and organisations in Australia that are trying to understand and navigate the framework.
The insights we gained during its development may be of interest to the TNFD team, and we welcome the opportunity to discuss the Catalogue further (see Appendix 1).
Our recommendations here are based on our experience developing the Catalogue, as well as extensive feedback and engagement with agriculture, conservation, finance, corporate and government sectors to drive consistency in natural capital measurement.
Submission summary
Clear and consistent sector guidance is critical to support and scale market adoption of TNFD Recommendations.
Climateworks recommends that the TNFD consider the following points when finalising sector guidance for F&P and F&A sectors.
Additional details for each of these points are included in the submission.
Climateworks recommends:
- harmonising the content across all of the sector-specific guidance documents, except where content needs to be different for different sectors. Alternatively, consideration could be 1 given to bringing all of the sector-specific guidance back together into a single document, with sector-specific elements identified within this.
- presenting disclosure metrics based on broad natural capital asset classes that each metric primarily relates to (e.g. water; weather and climate; land and soil; biodiversity and ecosystems).
- adopting a consistent format for disclosure metrics, including, where appropriate, non-prescriptive examples of production-related denominators.