Nature Positive: From Resilience to Value Creation

Nature is material business infrastructure, yet corporate strategies and capital allocation remain fundamentally misaligned. Around 55% of global GDP depends on ecosystem services, yet financing continues to favour nature-negative activities by 30 to 1. Regulators are now embedding nature into due diligence, risk management and corporate reporting, making nature-related performance a decisive factor for corporates and financial institutions alike.

There is a financing gap to reach nature targets — and public spending won't close it. Meeting global biodiversity, climate and restoration targets requires a sharp increase in investment in nature. Public funding will remain dominant, but private capital must play a critical role through blended finance, green bonds and emerging nature markets.

Nature-positive innovation is investment-ready, with a range of deployable solutions available. A growing portfolio of solutions across agri-food, the built environment and energy is ready for investment today — spanning materials innovation, ecosystem regeneration, circular and water stewardship solutions, and nature finance instruments. The WEF estimates the nature-positive economy could unlock USD 10.1 trillion in annual business value by 2030.

Early movers build resilience and capture new value; those who delay face material risks. Acting early on nature-positive solutions cuts operating costs, strengthens supply chains, protects asset values and opens access to growing nature-positive markets. Companies that delay face mounting operational, regulatory and financial pressures. PwC and Innovate 4 Nature support companies in turning disclosure into action.

Awareness is rising; strategy and execution are lagging. A growing share of large Swiss companies now recognise nature as material to their business. Far fewer however, have built a corporate strategy around it, and only a small minority have translated this into nature-positive action.

Nature risk sits in the upstream value chain. For most Swiss companies, the primary nature hotspot lies in the materials and inputs sourced upstream, much of which is abroad through imports. Effective response requires looking beyond their own operations, into the value chains and raw materials that production depends on.

Materials innovation is where solutions cluster. Circular solutions, bio-based substitutes and regenerative materials form the largest pool of deployable solutions today across sectors. As product-level regulation tightens, from EUDR to PPWR and the Digital Product Passport, rethinking materials becomes both a compliance lever and a source of competitive advantage.

Solutions are ready, and so is the appetite to co-create. A growing pipeline of nature-positive solutions is ready for deployment today, and most Swiss companies surveyed are open to joint innovation projects. The bottleneck is no longer whether solutions exist, but how fast corporates, investors and innovators connect to scale them.

PwC Switzerland and Innovate 4 Nature (I4N) support companies in moving from nature-related reporting and risk assessment to strategy, financing and deployment. We help organisations assess materiality, understand regulatory urgency, identify investment-ready solutions and scale nature-positive innovation.