Nature Footprint Services

Nature Footprint Services is an advisory and analysis service from Vizzuality for companies that need to understand the environmental impact of their commodity sourcing beyond carbon. Sustainability managers in food and apparel often cannot trace every commodity to its origin, which makes it hard to compare risks, set credible nature targets or prepare for frameworks such as SBTN and TNFD.

Vizzuality builds a geospatial sourcing model from the client's procurement data, using exact sourcing locations where they exist and spatial models, crop production maps and trade data where they do not. It then calculates impacts in four areas: water, land conversion, biodiversity and deforestation. The work is done with LandGriffon, Vizzuality's open-source supply chain platform, which combines the sourcing maps with satellite-based and other spatial datasets. In LandGriffon's published methodology (2023), deforestation is estimated from Global Forest Watch tree cover loss data, cropland expansion into natural ecosystems from a 10 m land cover map derived from Sentinel-2, and water stress from WRI Aqueduct. Land use change is attributed to sourcing within a 50 km radius, so exact farm locations are not required.

The service offers:

• Risk and priority assessment: identifies the commodities, products and supply chain segments with the highest environmental impact.
• Target setting and monitoring: nature targets based on GIS sourcing, life cycle assessment and scientific methodologies.
• Flexible approach: adapted to the client's level of traceability, business model and operations.

In 2024 Vizzuality and Planet Tracker used the approach for the Tracking Nature Impacts report, an external analysis of Nestlé's coffee, cocoa, fresh milk and palm oil sourcing based on publicly available data.