Global engineering consultancy AECOM recently partnered with Nature-based Insights and Global Canopy to pilot the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures’ (TNFD) LEAP approach for assessing the nature-related risks of its infrastructure projects across Asia. The pilot focused on projects in South Asia, South-East Asia, and East Asia, covering a range of biomes, including tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests, savannah and shrublands, inland wetlands, and mangroves.
Nature-based Insights supported AECOM and Global Canopy with technical aspects of the TNFD LEAP approach, a key tool to help companies report in line with the TNFD recommendations.
The LEAP approach involves four key phases:
- Locate – identify interface with nature;
- Evaluate – dependencies and impacts on nature;
- Assess – nature-related risks and opportunities; and
- Prepare – to respond to, and report in line with the TNFD recommendations.
The pilot provided valuable insights into the potential benefits of applying the TNFD LEAP approach to infrastructure projects. The case study highlights how high-level screening processes, in line with the TNFD recommendations, could be used to support increasingly comprehensive environmental impact assessments and due diligence processes. To provide a fuller picture of nature-related risks and dependencies from within an infrastructure project’s sphere of influence, the case study also included an analysis of the supply chain materials and processes used in the construction of infrastructure projects.
AECOM’s Biodiversity Lead – Singapore, Ash Welch, said: “The TNFD pilot undertaken in collaboration with Global Canopy has provided an invaluable opportunity to understand how existing environmental assessments, such as Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), compare and contrast with applying the TNFD recommendations on infrastructure development projects. We are keen to utilise the findings and learnings from this pilot to encourage the adoption of the TNFD recommendations within projects, given the way that TNFD approaches assessments in a more holistic way, covering aspects of environmental assessment that most EIAs do not consider, such as landscape scale issues, long term risks, and value chain impacts.”
More information
Read the technical case study
Read more about the TNFD.
Find out more, in an educational webinar
22 January 2024
