Climate has dominated sustainability disclosure for a decade. Nature is next, and the timetable is now firm. During its June 2026 conference, the IFRS Foundation confirmed that the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) will publish its nature-related disclosure proposals as an exposure draft in October 2026, timed to land ahead of the year’s biodiversity COP. For reporting teams that have spent two years building climate data pipelines, this is the signal to start scoping the next frontier before it becomes mandatory.
The proposals will take the form of an IFRS Practice Statement rather than a new standalone standard, a route the ISSB agreed in April 2026. That structural choice matters, and it draws heavily on a framework many sustainability teams already recognise: the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). Here is what is coming, why it consolidates TNFD as the global baseline, and the practical groundwork worth doing now.
What the ISSB actually announced
The October exposure draft will not be a tenth topical standard sitting alongside IFRS S1 and S2. Instead, it will be an IFRS Practice Statement — guidance that helps companies apply the existing ISSB standards, together with the SASB Standards, to nature-related topics. In plain terms, it explains how to surface material nature information using the machinery investors already understand, rather than asking preparers to learn an entirely separate rulebook.
The scope spans the nature topics that most often drive financial risk: land use, water, pollution, resource use, and biodiversity. These are the areas where dependencies on natural systems — reliable water, healthy soil, stable ecosystems — and impacts on them can translate into cost, disruption, or lost access to markets and finance. And crucially, the ISSB has confirmed the proposals will draw directly on the TNFD framework, giving early TNFD adopters a genuine head start.
One point deserves emphasis: an exposure draft is a consultation, not a final requirement. The October text will open a comment window before anything is finalised. That is time to prepare, not a reason to wait.
Why TNFD is becoming the baseline
TNFD published its final recommendations in September 2023, deliberately mirroring the four-pillar structure — Governance, Strategy, Risk and Impact Management, and Metrics and Targets — that the market already knew from the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. That familiarity was the point. Anyone who has produced climate disclosure recognises the shape of a TNFD report immediately.
The ISSB’s decision to build its nature guidance on TNFD follows the same path climate took. The TCFD recommendations were absorbed into IFRS S2 and the TCFD itself wound down, with its monitoring role passing to the IFRS Foundation. Nature is now travelling that route: a voluntary framework maturing into the reference point for a global, investor-focused standard. For preparers, that convergence is good news — it means the effort you put into TNFD-aligned work is unlikely to be wasted when the ISSB text lands.
It also connects to obligations some companies already face. Under the CSRD, ESRS E4 requires disclosure on biodiversity and ecosystems where material, so EU-scope reporters are not starting from zero. If you are still mapping what “material” means across environmental and social topics, our guide to double materiality under CSRD is a useful companion, because nature dependencies and impacts sit squarely inside that assessment.
What nature disclosure asks of you
Nature reporting differs from climate reporting in one important respect. Greenhouse gases are broadly comparable wherever they are emitted, so a tonne of CO2e is a tonne of CO2e. Nature is local: the same activity can be immaterial at one site and severe at another, depending on the ecosystem around it. That is why TNFD frames the work through its LEAP approach — Locate, Evaluate, Assess, Prepare — which pushes teams to start from where they operate and interface with nature.
- Locate your interface with nature — the sites, assets, and supply-chain nodes that sit in or near sensitive ecosystems and water-stressed areas.
- Evaluate your dependencies and impacts at those locations, from water abstraction to land-use change.
- Assess the resulting risks and opportunities in financial terms your board and investors can act on.
- Prepare to respond and report, aligning the output with the four disclosure pillars.
The practical implication is that location-level data — not just enterprise totals — becomes the raw material of a credible nature disclosure. Teams used to reporting a single group emissions figure will need to think at the level of individual sites and suppliers.
How to get TNFD-ready before October
You do not need to wait for the exposure draft to make progress. A focused scoping exercise now will make the eventual reporting far less painful:
- Run a first-pass location screen. Map your operational sites and material suppliers against water stress and biodiversity-sensitivity data to see where nature risk concentrates.
- Reuse your climate governance. The board oversight and risk processes you built for climate extend naturally to nature; you are adding a topic, not rebuilding the structure.
- Fold nature into your materiality assessment. Treat dependencies and impacts on nature as candidate material topics in your next review rather than a separate, bolt-on exercise.
- Audit your data foundations. Location-level, supplier-level detail is harder to assemble than a single carbon figure. Knowing where those gaps are now is worth more than a polished narrative later.
- Track the convergence. Watch how the ISSB draft aligns with TNFD and ESRS E4 so you build once and disclose against several frameworks.
Because the ISSB is building on structures the market already uses, the teams that stay closest to their climate disciplines will adapt fastest. If your climate reporting still leans on TCFD-era foundations, our explainer on how TCFD and CSRD align is a helpful reference point for understanding how these frameworks fit together.
The bottom line
Nature disclosure is following the same trajectory climate did: a voluntary framework, growing adoption, then absorption into the ISSB baseline. The October exposure draft is the moment that trajectory becomes concrete. Companies that begin locating their nature interface and tightening their data now will meet it as a manageable extension of existing work — not a standing start.
Horizon ESG is an audit-ready ESG reporting platform that helps reporting teams manage climate, CSRD, and emerging nature requirements in one place, so location-level and supplier data feed straight into disclosure rather than living in scattered spreadsheets. Book a short demo to see how we can help you get ahead of the ISSB timeline with clarity.