Locate: Interface with Nature

Locate: Interface with Nature

What Does "Locate" Mean in Practice?

Locating your interface with nature means identifying the specific sites, landscapes, and ecosystems where your organisation's activities could either depend on or affect natural systems. The TNFD defines a nature interface as any point where business activity and natural capital intersect in a way that could be material to either the business or the ecosystem.

This is not simply a matter of knowing your factory addresses. Many of the most significant nature interactions occur upstream in supply chains, where raw materials are extracted, grown, or harvested from landscapes your company may never visit directly. A food company's greatest biodiversity exposure might be in the tropical forests cleared for palm oil three tiers back in its supply chain, not on its own premises.

Priority Locations: Where to Focus First

Because comprehensive spatial mapping across all operations and every supply chain tier is neither feasible nor proportionate in a first iteration, the TNFD LEAP guidance introduces the concept of priority locations. These are sites that warrant closer scrutiny because of elevated ecological sensitivity or because of the scale of the business activity occurring there.

Priority locations are typically identified by overlaying two types of information. First, you need the geographic coordinates or asset locations of your operations and key supply chain nodes. Second, you need spatial biodiversity data that indicates ecological importance, such as proximity to protected areas, Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs), or areas with high species richness or endemism.

Biomes and Ecosystem Types

Not all ecosystems carry equal risk profiles. Understanding which biomes your operations intersect with is fundamental to determining the likely nature of your dependencies and impacts. The TNFD recommends using the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology (GET) as the standard classification framework, which organises the world's ecosystems into a hierarchy from broad biomes down to specific ecosystem functional groups.

Terrestrial biomes such as tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, Mediterranean shrublands, and temperate grasslands each host distinct ecological communities with different vulnerability profiles. Aquatic biomes including marine coastal systems, rivers, and lakes face different pressure types. At the Locate stage, broad biome classification is sufficient; later phases refine this to specific ecosystem types.

Direct Operations vs. Value Chain

The TNFD scope of assessment mirrors the familiar Scope 1, 2, 3 structure from climate accounting, but applied to nature. Direct operations are analogous to Scope 1: these are sites the organisation owns, operates, or controls. Supply chain interactions extend into upstream (raw material sourcing) and downstream (product use and end-of-life) value chains.

Sector Materiality and Hot Spots

Different sectors interact with nature in fundamentally different ways, and the TNFD recognises this through sector-specific guidance. Agriculture and food companies typically have their most significant nature interfaces in crop-growing regions and sourcing landscapes. Extractives companies face high-intensity localised impacts at mine sites and well pads. Infrastructure developers confront linear habitat fragmentation. Financial institutions face indirect nature exposure through their loan books and investment portfolios.

Sector materiality guides where to look first. A mining company should prioritise mapping its concession areas against protected area and KBA boundaries. A consumer goods company should trace its top five commodity supply chains to origin countries and identify the biomes those commodities come from. A bank should screen its corporate loan portfolio for clients in the most nature-intensive sectors.

Mapping Tools and Data Sources

The practical work of location mapping draws on several freely available and commercially available datasets. The TNFD tools catalogue identifies recommended resources for the Locate phase:

• IBAT (Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool): The TNFD's recommended starting point for protected area and KBA screening; combines IUCN Red List, World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), and World Database of Key Biodiversity Areas.
• Global Forest Watch: Real-time deforestation alerts and forest cover change data, essential for companies with forest-risk commodity exposure.
• MapBiomas: Annual land use and land cover maps for Brazil and other tropical countries, enabling traceability to specific municipalities and biomes.
• Aqueduct (WRI): Water risk mapping tool that identifies watersheds under physical water stress, regulatory risk, and reputational risk.
• ENCORE: Identifies dependencies and impacts by sector and sub-sector, which informs which ecosystem types are most relevant to screen at the Locate stage.

Documenting and Communicating Location Results

The output of the Locate phase is a prioritised list of sites or geographies that will carry forward into deeper analysis. For disclosure purposes under TNFD, Strategy disclosure S4 specifically requires organisations to "disclose the locations of assets and/or activities in the organisation's direct operations and, where possible, upstream and downstream value chains that meet the criteria for priority locations." This means the Locate output is not only an internal management tool but a formal disclosure element.

Companies at the early stages of LEAP implementation often find the Locate phase more time-consuming than expected, primarily because of the challenge of obtaining geographic coordinates for supplier facilities. Practical approaches include supplier questionnaires requesting GPS coordinates, third-party traceability platforms, and commodity-specific sourcing maps from industry databases.