Insights

Procurement as Leverage: Embedding Nature into Supply Chains

Dr Samuel Sinclair

For most organisations, the supply chain is where a nature strategy stops being a document and starts becoming a set of decisions.

Our new report, Procurement as Leverage: Embedding Nature into Supply Chains, draws on insights from sustainability leaders gathered by Biodiversify and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, alongside perspectives from our cross-sector Nature and Biodiversity Peer Group. The report explores how businesses can integrate nature into sourcing decisions, supplier relationships and commercial systems that shape their impacts and dependencies, rather than remaining siloed in sustainability teams.

For many companies, their most significant nature-related impacts and dependencies sit upstream. However, procurement teams are often being asked to deliver sustainability ambitions while balancing cost, supplier availability, quality, contracts and continuity, without always having the incentives or information needed to act.

The report looks at how organisations can bridge that gap, from understanding nature risk at a category level and tackling supplier fatigue to designing pilots that can scale and building stronger, longer-term supplier relationships.

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Procurement as Leverage: Embedding Nature into Supply Chains

What You’ll Learn

This report explores how organisations can turn nature commitments into practical changes across procurement and supply chains.

How to make nature relevant to procurement – Why nature is more likely to gain traction when it is connected to the priorities procurement teams already manage, including supplier resilience, sourcing continuity and commercial risk.
How to reduce supplier fatigue – Why overlapping questionnaires and fragmented sustainability requests can place unnecessary pressure on suppliers, and how better coordination and prioritisation can help.
Why category-level understanding matters – How looking at specific commodities, sourcing regions and supplier relationships can help businesses identify where nature-related exposure is greatest and where they have the strongest opportunity to act.
How to move beyond pilot projects – Why successful pilots do not automatically translate into organisation-wide change, and how considering ownership, governance, financing and supplier needs from the outset can make initiatives easier to scale.
How to balance flexibility with long-term action – Why the short-term flexibility built into many sourcing models can conflict with the continuity required for ecosystem resilience and long-term supplier partnerships.
Why collaboration is increasingly important – How aligned supplier questionnaires, shared traceability systems, landscape initiatives and commodity-level coordination can reduce duplication and support action across complex supply chains.
What procurement maturity looks like in practice – How organisations can progress from isolated supplier initiatives towards embedding nature in sourcing decisions, supplier governance and long-term procurement strategy.

Who This Guide Is For

This guide is designed for:

Sustainability and ESG leaders
Corporate nature and biodiversity strategy teams
Professionals working at the intersection of nature, risk, and enterprise strategy

If you are working to move nature from commitments to implementation, this report offers practical insights grounded in real corporate experience.

About the Guide Series

This report is part of a Biodiversify guide series exploring how businesses can embed nature into enterprise strategy and move towards nature-positive outcomes.

Already published guides:

The guide series has been made possible through the support of the Porticus Foundation.

Dr Samuel Sinclair

Dr Sam Sinclair is a co-founder and director of Biodiversify, a consultancy which specialises in developing landscape-level plans for nature and supporting the private sector in developing nature-positive strategies.