Lawyers have always needed commercial awareness to understand their clients’ business context. Nature literacy is now fundamental to that professional competency. That is why the modular design of the International Bar Association’s (IBA) Nature-Intelligent Legal Services series provides a menu of starting points for busy practitioners. The IBA’s vision is for legal services providers to be the advisers that clients can turn to when navigating the nature-positive transition.
In the early 2020s, growing recognition of the impact of the climate crisis on legal practice gave rise to the notion that ‘every lawyer is a climate lawyer’. Bar associations around the globe, including the IBA, issued public statements encouraging lawyers to take a climate-conscious approach to legal practice. Lawyers collaborating with The Chancery Lane Project explored avenues for addressing climate-related risks through contract clauses. In the UK, the Law Society’s 2021 Climate Change Resolution urged solicitors to provide competent advice on climate-related legal risks, followed by its 2023 guidance that climate change may engage the duty of solicitors to warn clients in certain contexts. This inspired member firms of Legal Charter 1.5 to create a toolkit to classify client matters for climate impact.
Simultaneously, the world began waking up to the escalating impacts of nature-related financial risk. Following the adoption of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) published its 2023 framework to help businesses and investors assess and report on nature-related risks and opportunities. In the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Risks Report, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse has ranked in the top four long-term global risks every year since 2020, holding second place in 2025 and 2026. The 200 signatories of the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge (managing over €23tn in assets) have committed to disclosing nature-related impacts. The WEF and PwC have estimated that over half of the world’s GDP is moderately or highly dependent on ecosystem services. Moreover, the UK 2026 National Security Assessment recognises that nature loss is a national security risk, as well as a systemic risk to industry.
Nature’s relevance for the legal profession was spotlighted by the Commonwealth and Climate Law Initiative 2022 report on nature-related risk and directors’ duties and independent legal opinions, published in Australia, the UK and Canada. Nature-related risk is highly material to directors’ duties to exercise care and promote the success of the company. Nature loss creates foreseeable, quantifiable risks to supply chains, asset values and returns that boards can no longer treat as remote or unmanageable.
Despite these developments, recognition of the relevance of nature-related risk to legal practice remains nascent. Such risks are commonly perceived as compliance or environmental law issues, rather than relevant to corporate, commercial or financial law advice. Many law firms are early in their journey toward integrating climate into their core work. They do not feel ready yet to consider nature-related risks, particularly in light of uncertainty surrounding European sustainability regulations and a lack of mandatory nature-related risk reporting or due diligence in most jurisdictions.
However, the relevance of nature-related risks to commercial clients far exceeds regulatory compliance concerns: physical risks from water scarcity affect manufacturing operations; deforestation drives supply chain disruption; and soil degradation triggers commodity price volatility. Investor Erika Hombert described this gap as a ‘black elephant’, a looming systemic threat that is highly visible but treated as though it were improbable and unforeseeable. As she put it: ‘Nature is not adjacent to the economy, it is the substrate of it’.
Enter the IBA with the Nature-Intelligent Legal Services series, developed as a collaborative effort with Jenni and several IBA committees, supported by the IBA Legal Policy & Research Unit. As Wangui Kaniaru (co-chair of the IBA Law Firm Management Committee ESG Subcommittee) and Els Reynaers (co-chair of the IBA Environment, Health and Safety Law Committee), said: ‘All businesses, including law firms, depend on services provided by nature as sources of value, either directly or through their supply chains. Meanwhile, we know that many business activities are adversely impacting nature, for example through contributing to climate change, pollution or over-exploitation of ecosystems. These impacts and dependencies on nature create risks for organisations and their value chains.’ They can also create legal issues which lawyers may help clients to address.
The three-part series gives legal professionals the tools to move from awareness to action: understanding their clients’ nature exposure; identifying where to focus; and knowing how to embed nature considerations into the advice and contracts they are already delivering. The Business Case Guide explains why legal service providers should engage, examining nature-related risks, opportunities and the competitive advantages to those who act early. The Nature-Intelligent Legal Services Toolkit enables client assessment of sectoral nature exposure and governance maturity, supporting strategic portfolio analysis across a firm’s client base. The Nature-Intelligent Legal Advisory and Clause Guide provides starting points for embedding nature considerations into advice and contracts across practice areas. These range from procurement and financial agreements to construction and employment contracts, with case studies drawn from real TNFD disclosures, universal clauses and a library of clause ideas.
As James Cameron, senior adviser at Arden Climate Law and Policy, observed: ‘This is a hugely valuable endeavour. Thoroughly researched, clearly articulated and professionally presented, this series will help lawyers and decision-makers bound by law to properly value nature and natural systems in their work.’
Jenni Ramos is a corporate and nature lawyer and Emily Morison projects officer, IBA Environment, Health and Safety Law Committee
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