Understanding how Australia's largest companies disclose nature risk
Assessing how Australia's 200 largest publicly-listed companies (the ASX200) currently report their impacts, dependencies, and risks on nature to the public and shareholders.
Research Cluster
Project Team
Dr Billy Geary (Lead CI, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences), Qingting Liao, James Nolan, Sam Hickman, Prof Brendan Wintle, Dr Attila Balogh, Dr Tina Parkhurst, Prof Glenn Hoetker
Contact
Project summary
As investors and governments increasingly require businesses to disclose their impacts on nature, how are Australia's largest companies actually reporting? This project will assess how Australia's 200 largest publicly-listed companies (the ASX200) currently report their impacts, dependencies, and risks on nature to the public and shareholders. Building on established qualitative approaches and developing AI-powered tools for analysis, the project will create a transparent, regularly updatable database of corporate nature-related disclosures in Australia.
What are we interested in?
The business sector has significant impacts and dependencies on nature globally, and there is increasing recognition that biodiversity loss poses material risks to businesses. Investors, shareholders, and governments are requiring businesses to disclose and act on these impacts. However, existing methods for quantifying business impacts give inconsistent advice and lack ecological rigour, while qualitative alternatives have not been tested or compared with quantitative approaches. We are interested in developing datasets and methods to help address these problems.
The goals of our project
To develop and test a qualitative approach for assessing how Australia's largest companies publicly report their nature-related impacts, dependencies, and risks; to create a database of corporate nature disclosures for 2023 and 2024; and to train an AI tool capable of analysing future reports for rapid tracking over time.
Outcomes / activities
Workshop to finalise review questions with a systematic review of annual reports, board papers, and strategic documents for ASX200 companies.
Dissemination of open-source database and AI tool published with accompanying academic outputs, media articles and stakeholder engagements.