From Research Lab to Global Force: How GIST Impact is Changing the Way We Value Nature
GIST Impact began in 2013 as a small research lab with a bold mission: to measure what traditional metrics like GDP and profit leave out. Over the past decade, it has evolved into a global data company, providing investors, banks, and corporates with science-based insights into how their decisions affect both nature and society, and how environmental and social realities, in turn, shape business risks. By combining world-class science with AI-driven tools and a strong partnership ecosystem, GIST Impact has positioned itself as the “impact inside” for decision-makers worldwide.
Read on to explore their journey, their pioneering collaborations, and their vision for embedding holistic performance metrics at the heart of corporate decision-making.
Image Credits: Unsplash (Zdeněk Macháček)
About GIST Impact
Q. GIST Impact started as a research lab and has grown into a global data company. Can you share the story of that journey, and what motivated the shift toward a data-first model?
Our organisation was born out of a recognition that the metrics we use to measure performance and make decisions are not fit for purpose: GDP as a measure of national performance, or profit as a measure of corporate performance. Neither of them accounts for the full picture.
We started life in 2013, as a groundbreaking research lab helping a handful of companies and governments quantify their impacts on natural capital. 12 years later, we have scaled from a tiny research lab to a leading data and analytics player, the chosen data provider to the world’s largest asset owners, asset managers, banks and companies. To have the impact we wanted to have, we knew we had to move faster and aim higher. We set out to become the ‘impact inside’ - we wanted decision-makers everywhere to have access to the high-quality, science-based data we provided. This meant investing in an AI-led tech build out, and setting up a strong partnership ecosystem.
Our mission itself remains intact: we calculate the holistic performance of companies, how they affect the environment and society (impacts), and how environmental and social realities affect them (risks), all expressed in economic terms, in the hope that if we we measure all aspects of value created and value destroyed in this way, and embed it into our systems of accounting, we can start to make different decisions, and better decisions for our collective future.
Q. Your team often emphasizes linking nature and social impacts. Why do you see these two dimensions as inseparable?
We view nature and social impacts as two sides of the same coin because they are so deeply connected: when ecosystems are degraded, people’s health, livelihoods, and communities are affected. Using the four capitals framework helps us show how environmental change translates directly into social and economic consequences, and why tackling nature loss is also about improving positive social outcomes. Take air pollution, for example: while often seen as an environmental issue, it directly affects human health through respiratory disease and economic productivity through healthcare costs and lost working days.
Solutions and Approach
Q. You’ve recently enhanced your Nature & Biodiversity solution with the Biodiversity Intactness Index in collaboration with the Natural History Museum. How does this integration work, and who is it designed to serve?
Developed by researchers at the Natural History Museum, the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) is widely recognised as the most scientifically robust measure of ecosystem health. The BII tracks how biodiversity in terrestrial ecosystems is affected by human activities, particularly land use change and intensification, and can robustly model future scenarios. The market has long been hungry for a metric that accurately captures the state of nature, and crucially, how each corporate asset might affect the intactness of the ecosystem surrounding it.
Our collaboration with the Natural History Museum reflects both our ethos and our operating model: fuse world-class science with world-class corporate data, add AI-led explainability, and get those insights onto a risk manager’s screen in weeks instead of years. The integration with GIST Impact data turns the BII from a robust scientific map layer into an actionable, investor-grade dataset that can directly inform financial and strategic decision-making. This meets the growing demand for decision-useful nature data, driven by disclosure frameworks such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN), and the Partnership for Biodiversity Accounting Financials (PBAF), as well as rising regulatory and investor expectations.
We don’t believe in black boxes or inventing new methodologies for their own sake. Instead, we rely on the painstaking work of mission-driven organisations such as the Natural History Museum, IBAT, and Global Canopy - who have been collecting meaningful data for years - and put that data quickly to use. Because our organisations are both mission-driven, there is a deep trust and strong alignment, making this collaboration not only effective but natural. You can read more about the details of our collaboration here.
Image Credits: Unsplash (Marc Lamy)
Q. What makes your approach to biodiversity and climate risk assessment distinct from others in the market (e.g. portfolio-level vs. site-level data)?
What makes our approach distinct is the integrity and traceability of our data. Every result is linked back to its underlying source, which gives clients confidence in how insights are derived and the science it’s based on. Where direct data isn’t available, we use AI estimation models. Added to this is the breadth of our coverage - spanning over 18,000 companies and more than 3.5 million assets mapped globally.
Q. How do you adapt your insights for different audiences - investors with strong analytical capacity versus corporates that need more hands-on support?
We start with the same science-based foundation but tailor how our insights are delivered based on the client’s use cases. For investors, who often have strong analytical capacity and need data on thousands of companies across their portfolios, we provide portfolio-level data, analytics, benchmarks, and scenario analysis that can be integrated directly into investment models.
For corporates, we take a more hands-on approach, working closely with teams to embed impact and risk data into day-to-day decisions - from supply chain management to capital allocation and target-setting. In both cases, our role is to make complex impact information actionable, adapting our approach and meeting our clients where they are.
Market and Impact
Q. You’ve described climate and biodiversity risk as moving from “nice-to-have” to a central concern for corporates and investors. What trends are you most excited by right now?
Nature Value at Risk and AI.
Q. Could you share some examples that illustrate your impact so far, like the collaboration with Norges Bank or the Union Bank of India pilot?
Earlier this year, Norges Bank published their Climate and Nature Disclosures Report. Using GIST Impact’s data, NBIM was able to provide key insights into how their portfolio interacts with critical environmental factors, including Mapping biodiversity risk, Assessing water stress exposure, and Breaking down impact intensity. Read their full report here, and for insights driven by GIST Impact data, see pp. 37-42.
We were recently selected by Union Bank of India (UBI) to deliver a landmark climate risk solution that will help the bank align with regulatory mandates to proactively manage climate-related financial risks. Using our solution, which meets all Basel-II and III requirements, UBI will be able to accurately integrate asset level risk analysis and precise geolocation capabilities into its credit risk assessments. The solution calculates 18 physical and 12 transition risks, and generates projections for all risk metrics at asset level, providing bottom-up aggregation for all asset classes.
Q. From your perspective, what does success look like for GIST Impact in shaping nature-positive finance?
Our mission is to redefine corporate performance by measuring what truly matters: impacts, dependencies, and risks across nature, climate, and society, not just returns to shareholders. This informs our vision of the future, and how we gauge our success as an organisation is largely dependent on how broadly we’ve influenced the uptake of this approach to corporate performance.
Collaboration and Community
Q. What motivated you to join the Nature Tech Collective, and how do you see GIST Impact contributing to this community?
We were motivated by the sense of community that the NTC provides, and the role NTC plays in convening and collating wide-ranging but oftentimes complementary nature tech solutions in one place. We’re an organisation that’s driven by scientific best practice, and want to position ourselves in collectives that foster collaboration with other organisations to bring the best available products to market, as quickly as possible. We need these solutions to scale, and to scale fast!
GIST Impact has been around for a long time in different avatars: and so we have both battle scars and the recipes for success to share with our fellow NTC members! We also have a very brilliant team: over half our colleagues have advanced technical degrees (Masters or PhDs), so we are very happy to geek out and guide on complex nature and biodiversity related questions.
Q. You floated the idea of mapping a “nature data ladder” to better position your work alongside peers. How do you imagine initiatives like this strengthening collaboration in the sector?
Our idea of mapping the “nature data ladder” was drawn from a recurring problem of blurred boundaries when it comes to understanding how far an organisation’s solution stretches (in terms of capabilities), and at what point another organisation’s solutions are best-suited to ‘pick-up’ and take forward. The conversation started with our friends at NatureMetrics (who are also NTC members) - their eDNA data collected onsite at a specific location, is a powerful way to understand the state of nature, and species presence on the ground. But that kind of granular, site-level diagnostic solves a very different challenge than, say, portfolio-level biodiversity foot printing, which models potential impacts and dependencies across hundreds of thousands of assets in a financial institution’s portfolio. The vision was an end-to-end map of nature data providers, with clear parameters of how each of our solutions collectively meet the full spectrum of market needs.
Q. In what ways do you see GIST Impact’s role as complementary to other members in the ecosystem (e.g. on-site data providers vs. portfolio-level analytics)?
We see our role as complementary to other members of the ecosystem because we focus on collecting high quality and traceable company data (including on corporate pressures), and translating that using scientifically-robust methods into decision-useful insights. Many organisations in the Collective provide critical on-the-ground or satellite data, and we’re well-placed to onboard that data, integrate it with corporate data (e.g. asset locations, or water consumption, or pollution) and provide it to both corporations and investors.
Looking Forward
Q. What are your top priorities and goals for the next 12–18 months?
Scaling Product Adoption: We are focusing on embedding our nature and biodiversity and climate risk solutions into the workflows of financial institutions and corporates. Our priority is to make our data not just available, but actionable - and working closely with our clients to demonstrate how it can be used to shape decisions in capital allocation, supply chain management, and beyond.
Deepening our Tech Partnerships: We are lucky to be partnered with some of the world’s leading consulting firms, ESG reporting platforms, and business alliances. We want to now deepen our collaboration across complementary nature tech providers, finding those key areas of value exchange so we can scale solutions quickly.
Q. What challenges do you anticipate in scaling your platform, and how could the NTC community best support you in this journey?
One of the biggest challenges is navigating a fast-moving and sometimes confusing data landscape. With so many new solutions emerging, it can be tricky for them to know which approaches are robust and decision-useful. They face a trade-off between simplicity and robustness; on the one hand, they solve an immediate need but risk undermining long-term progress: on the other, they get overwhelmed and face analysis paralysis. That’s why we see a key part of our role as providing market education: helping clients understand what good looks like, showing how different solutions complement one another, giving them an understanding on what to use in what instance. This is where NTC can play a powerful role: by convening solutions and amplifying practical examples and use cases, users can say ‘hey that looks like the problem I have’ and help them distinguish between different offerings, building trust in the ecosystem. That in turn makes it easier for companies like ours to scale while ensuring clients get the clarity and confidence they need to act.
We are addressing this on our end through transparency (full traceability back to source), seamless integration (modular and API first) and building bridges between datasets, but it's a big task.
Personal Reflections
Q. What inspires you personally and as a team in this important work?
For me, I realised we weren't going to be able to solve our environmental problems until we solved the data problem. After 15 years working tirelessly on corporate sustainability challenges, all the initiatives I ever built and contributed to either got shelved, quietly shut down, or never scaled, or didn't get funding. Targets were missed, ambition scaled back. Why? Because the success of these efforts didn't translate into success of the business. They were happening on two parallel tracks. I know now that it's impossible to truly change corporate incentives unless you're talking sustainability in the language of business - and that's $.
Q. Are there books, frameworks, podcasts, or thought leaders that have influenced your approach or that you recommend?
The Four Capitals Approach, The Economics and Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), The New Nature of Business (Andre Hoffmann)
Looking forward, GIST Impact is focused on scaling the adoption of its nature, biodiversity, and climate risk solutions while continuing to champion transparency and collaboration across the sector. For them, success means not only advancing robust methodologies, but also ensuring that businesses and investors have the clarity and confidence to act. By translating complex impacts into decision-useful insights, GIST Impact is helping build the data foundations for a more resilient, nature-positive economy.
👉 Want to learn more? Explore GIST Impact’s website and connect with them on LinkedIn to follow their latest insights and collaborations.
