Better Decisions: Nature & Climate as Strategic Intelligence
Take a business decision you make, any decision, and think about the information you use to inform it. Most decisions are based on a relatively small set of financial, operational, and strategic metrics. But what if there are important costs, benefits, risks, or opportunities hiding just outside the frame of the analysis?
This post is part of a new series, Better Decisions, where we use practical examples to illustrate how impact thinking can complement traditional analysis, helping decision-makers better understand tradeoffs, uncover hidden risks, and identify new opportunities for value creation.
Businesses today operate in systems that are increasingly interconnected. A chocolatier in Mexico may experience price surges in cocoa as heavy rainfall damages crops in West Africa. A European lumber supplier may be affected by tariff wars, increased wildfires, and bark beetle outbreaks in North America. The combined effects of an ever interconnected and variable world are fluctuating costs, reduced resource availability, unreliable supply chains. These effects get handed down to the employees, customers, communities, and the natural systems on which businesses ultimately depend.
Yet many organizations still make decisions through a relatively narrow lens: Where can I buy the cheapest raw materials? What is the short-term return? Can we meet the requirement?
Yet the real lesson from these examples is not simply that risks exist, but that businesses often lack visibility into the systems that create them. Climate, nature, biodiversity, and social conditions are not separate from business performance; they are factors that influence the availability of resources, the resilience of supply chains, and the stability of markets.
In 2026, we have a real opportunity to rethink sustainability, not simply as a compliance requirement or corporate responsibility initiative, but as information with strategic decision-making capacity. Comprehensive impact thinking helps organizations see connections, anticipate risks, evaluate trade-offs, and make decisions that create value over the long term.
The Cost of Narrow Decision-Making
A narrow decision may look efficient on paper while creating costs elsewhere in the system.
Consider food. Agriculture fundamentally depends on ecosystem services such as healthy soils, water, pollinators, biodiversity, and functioning ecosystems. Yet a food company evaluating a supplier may focus primarily on price, quality, and delivery reliability. These factors matter, but they do not tell the whole story.
What happens when soil degradation reduces yields? When water becomes scarce? When extreme weather disrupts production? When a lack of crop diversity increases vulnerability to disease or climate shocks?
These are not simply environmental problems. As extreme weather increases so do crop failures. Prices go up, procurement becomes challenging, and continuity-of-supply becomes strained. Our changing climate can even affect the nutrient quality of food. A growing body of research suggests elevated CO2 emissions, air pollution and ground-level ozone can decrease nutrients (e.g., zinc, iron) and even the protein content of key staples such as wheat and rice. These deficiencies have real world effects, including weakened immune systems, lung infections, life threatening diarrheal diseases, increased infant mortality, and much more.
Similar dynamics exist in the technology sector. A company designing a device may evaluate component cost, performance, availability, and time to market. But those components depend on complex global supply chains and finite natural resources.
Take rare earth elements as an example, required for manufacturing the technological landscape we continue to deepen our dependence on. The majority of current reserves are located in only 7 countries, and China alone is responsible for a whopping ~70% of the current global production. Resources that are this important, this scarce, and this limited in geographical distribution are at a dramatically heightened supply-chain risk.
The lesson is not that businesses should ignore financial performance. Instead, it is that short-term financial performance is only one dimension of business performance. Integrating information that incorporates climatic, social, and geopolitical risks into the conversation in the decision-making process is crucial in our ever-changing world.
From Sustainability Thinking to Comprehensive Impact Thinking
A more resilient approach is to evaluate major decisions through multiple lenses. For some examples:
What are the costs, returns, and financial risks?
How does this affect reliability, efficiency, quality, and continuity?
What resources and natural systems does the decision depend on or affect?
How might it affect employees, customers, suppliers, and communities?
These lenses do not require a complicated new process. They can be incorporated into existing procurement reviews, product-development processes, capital planning, and strategic decisions.
A lower-cost material might reduce procurement expense today but increase exposure to resource scarcity tomorrow. A supplier with the lowest price might have greater climate or water vulnerability. A product designed for short replacement cycles might generate recurring sales but also create higher material costs, regulatory exposure, and waste-related challenges.
Comprehensive impact thinking makes these connections visible before they become expensive problems.
Biodiversity as a Strategic Business Indicator
Biodiversity provides a particularly powerful lens because it reveals how dependent businesses are on the natural systems around them.
More than an environmental concern, biodiversity can serve as an indicator of underlying business resilience.
For food companies, biodiversity can provide insights into the health of agricultural ecosystems and the resilience of supply. Crop diversity, soil health, pollination, water availability, and ecosystem integrity can all influence long-term productivity.
For technology companies, biodiversity may at first seem less directly relevant, but the connection becomes clearer when looking upstream. Mining and processing materials can affect ecosystems, while water, energy, and land are embedded throughout manufacturing and supply chains. A company's exposure to nature-related disruption may therefore extend far beyond its own facilities.
A smartphone company’s operations illustrate the complexity. A smartphone combines numerous materials and components sourced through global supply chains. Decisions about recycled materials, product durability, supplier practices, and recovery of valuable materials are not simply sustainability choices. They can influence material security, supply-chain resilience, manufacturing costs, and future regulatory requirements.
Likewise, printers demonstrate how product design can shape resource dependence. A business model built around frequent replacement of hardware and consumables creates different material and supply-chain dependencies than one emphasizing durability, reuse, remanufacturing, and recovery. Looking beyond the individual sale can reveal opportunities to reduce resource exposure while creating new forms of customer value.
The strategic question is:
What does our business depend on—and how resilient are those dependencies?
Putting the Framework into Practice
Companies do not need a large sustainability department or expensive technology to begin.
A procurement team can add questions about supplier exposure to water scarcity, ecosystem degradation, climate risk, or critical materials alongside traditional questions about price and quality.
A product team can evaluate not only manufacturing cost and customer demand, but also material intensity, product lifespan, repairability, and end-of-life options.
An operations team can identify which facilities or processes depend most heavily on water, energy, land, or vulnerable natural resources.
A stakeholder team can engage suppliers, customers, employees, NGOs, and local communities to identify risks that may not appear in conventional business data.
For SMEs, the starting point can be even simpler: choose one important product, supplier, or operational decision and map its key dependencies and potential impacts. The goal is not to measure everything. It is to identify the information that could materially change the decision.
A Practical Decision-Making Toolkit
Before making a significant business decision, leaders can ask:
Making Sustainability a Business Capability
The future of sustainability is not necessarily about adding another layer of reporting or another set of corporate commitments.
It is about improving the quality of decisions.
Biodiversity offers a powerful way to demonstrate this shift. By examining how businesses depend on and affect natural systems, leaders can uncover vulnerabilities that traditional financial or operational analysis may miss. The same approach can strengthen procurement, product development, operations, investment, and stakeholder strategy.
Ultimately, the value of comprehensive impact thinking is not that it makes businesses more sustainable for sustainability's sake.
It makes them better at understanding the systems in which they operate—and therefore better at making decisions.
In a world defined by interconnected risks and accelerating change, that may be one of the most important competitive capabilities a business can develop.