Corporate Nature Risk Exposure Evidence from Asset-Level Geospatial Data

Abstract

We develop a novel measure of corporate exposure to nature-related risk using asset level geospatial data. We assemble a new harmonized global database linking more than 109,000 physical assets of 4,578 publicly listed firms across 176 countries to location specific biodiversity and water risks. From these data, we construct Corporate Biodiversity Risk Exposure (CBRE) and Corporate Water Risk Exposure (CWRE) measure that account for the geographic distribution and economic importance of firms’ physical assets. We find substantial within-industry heterogeneity, with 43–63% of biodiversity risk variation and more than 91% of water-risk variation occurring within GICS sectors. We further show that accounting for economic importance materially changes measured exposure when heterogeneous nature risks coincide with concentrated asset portfolios. Our framework provides investors and risk managers with spatially explicit measures of corporate nature-risk exposure that help identify risks hidden by conventional firm and industry-level approaches.