In March Norway’s Norges Bank, the world’s largest investor at over 2 trillion (USD) in assets, announced it seeks a significant reduction in nature-related risk across its portfolio for the 7200+ global companies it owns. And just two weeks after Norway’s news, Canada announced a nearly 4 billion (CAN) national nature strategy that provides regulatory frameworks, incentives, and targets to conserve ecosystems, restore degraded lands, and promote regenerative land management across the country. In combination, both signal the newest global expectations for natural capital and nature policy, at the country and international level.
Norges Bank’s Nature Guidance joins an emerging chorus of aligned investor voices from several of the world’s largest asset owners and asset managers in countries like the Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, and others. And Canada’s Strategy to Protect Nature adds to and reinforces other country-specific nature protection and restoration initiatives like those in Australia, Brazil, the EU, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK.
These initiatives are poised to influence regenerative agriculture policies and practices across food, agriculture, and fashion companies (as well as across multiple other sectors), including common global supply chains. The implications extend beyond national borders, shaping corporate governance, supplier engagement, investment strategies, and market access.
Norges Bank’s 2026 Nature Guidance expands expectations for its portfolio companies to address nature-related risks and dependencies systematically. Key components include companies must: assess nature-related risks to identify impacts on ecosystems, habitats, and species; initiate target setting that establishes measurable, science-based objectives for nature-positive outcomes; make transparency key in reporting and disclosure aligned with global reporting frameworks like TNFD, including metrics on land use, biodiversity, and ecosystem restoration, and; engage and collaborate with other companies, policymakers, and industry coalitions to foster systemic change. By framing nature loss as financially material, Norges Bank has positioned sustainable nature use and management as a critical component of corporate strategy and the responsibility of a company’s board of directors, not just its employees.
Norges Bank’s guidance is an acknowledgement that portfolio companies across every possible sector utilize many of the same nature-derived molecules, ingredients, and materials as a common source of their products and services. That means there are nature-related risks for just about every company Norges owns, no matter the product or service. TIFS stakeholders have long-known the same nature-derived molecules and ingredients are used for different applications in different industries across investor portfolios. What’s new is the world’s largest investors and entire countries are unifying and recognizing the negative impacts and nature-related risk from depletion and misuse of non-renewable natural resources. To put it in corporate terms, nature-based inputs and impacts that used to be considered as intangible or non-material on a corporate balance sheet, and therefore invisible to the investors that own those companies, will now be getting much more attention.
Food, agriculture, and apparel companies will have to respond to Norges Bank’s guidance by integrating regenerative agriculture and other sustainable practices into their strategies. These could include procurement policies for suppliers for implementing regenerative and verifiable nature-positive production practices; technical and financial support to implement sustainable farming ranching, and fishing methods; investment in innovation such as adoption of precision agriculture, soil carbon monitoring, and biodiversity tracking technologies; and incorporating nature, biodiversity and regenerative agriculture metrics into corporate disclosures that documents alignment with investor expectations.
Canada’s new national nature strategy has goals to conserve ecosystems, restore degraded lands, and integrate biodiversity into land use considerations. Its key components include expansion of protected areas to better safeguard critical habitats and ecosystems; financial support, tax incentives, and technical assistance for improving regenerative agriculture and sustainable forestry practices; encouraging domestic industries to adopt traceable, ‘nature-positive’ sourcing and supply chain practices, and integration of indigenous stewardship knowledge and practices in land management and conservation initiatives. It’s hoped that this will lead to enhanced product differentiation for certified items and ingredients sourced from Canada and significant marketing advantages internationally. It’s likely multinational companies may extend Canadian standards to suppliers abroad to ensure compliance and investor acceptance across their own product portfolios.
When combined, new initiatives like Norges Bank’s Nature Guidance and Canada’s Strategy to Protect Nature, along with other existing and emerging investor and country initiatives, could create a reinforcing global policy and market ecosystem that better incentivizes companies to integrate regenerative and sustainable production and sourcing practices.
David Bennell is a managing director at Transformational Investing in Food Systems (TIFS). TIFS puts systemic investing strategies and financial innovations into action to help leaders, institutions, and intermediaries bridge capital, producers, and markets.