Assessing Climate Change Implications on Nature-Related Dependencies and Impacts: A Scenario-Based Approach for Industry-specific Insights

Climate change has now become a major issue for the whole world, as it not only brings unprecedented extreme weather events but also causes major disruptions to natural habitats and ecosystems. The impact of climate change on nature reduces the resources that nature provides, known as nature-related dependencies, while also increasing the disturbances caused by nature, known as nature-related impacts. These issues have also received attention from the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). This research is crucial because under climate change circumstances, corporations will face numerous operational hazards; while affecting nature, climate change also has a great impact on businesses, and companies that rely on natural resources have been negatively affected to a significant extent. Based on these concerns, we would like to investigate how climate change will affect nature-related issues.

Therefore, in this study, we will discuss climate change and nature-related issues, especially the two factors of dependence and impact, and analyze the changes in nature-related dependencies and impacts that climate change will bring to specific industries. The analysis will be divided into four major steps:

1. We will use three different types of Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios to simulate possible changes in temperature and rainfall under different future scenarios.

2. We will establish how nature-related dependencies and impacts will change as temperature and rainfall change under climate change.

3. We will use qualitative methods to grade the degree of change in nature-related dependencies and impacts from very low to very high, and use a visual method such as a Heatmap to present the results.

4. We will link these analyses to assess how climate change will affect the severity of nature-related dependencies and impacts across different industries, enabling them to quickly understand the specific challenges they will face. This will include integration of ENCORE for more detailed, sector-specific analysis.

The final outcome we expect to achieve is presenting the visualization results using a Heatmap to show the combination of climate change simulation on nature-related dependencies and impacts, and the industry-based data according to ENCORE, demonstrating how climate change will affect industrial nature-related issues.

This comprehensive framework will enable corporations to better understand the nature-related risks they may face under future climate change and adapt to evolving nature-related challenges while considering broader factors to mitigate risks and seize opportunities for sustainable growth.