LEAP approach
The LEAP approach is TNFD’s voluntary guidance for identifying and assessing nature-related issues: Locate interfaces with nature, Evaluate dependencies and impacts, Assess risks and opportunities, and Prepare to respond and report. It is a flexible analytical approach supporting TNFD-aligned decision-making and disclosure, not a certification, score, or mandatory linear checklist.
In simple terms
LEAP helps an organization connect business activities and value chains to specific locations and ecosystems. Locate identifies where operations and relationships interface with nature, including priority locations. Evaluate examines dependencies and impacts. Assess translates those findings into nature-related risks and opportunities. Prepare supports strategy, resource allocation, target setting, risk management, and disclosure. TNFD is the wider nature-related disclosure framework and recommendations; LEAP is its voluntary approach for supporting analysis, decisions, and disclosures. The phases inform one another and can be revisited as evidence improves; an organization need not mechanically complete every component in the same order. A Materiality matrix may summarize selected results, but it is not a required LEAP output. Scope, data, methods, and limitations should be documented.
Why it matters
Nature-related dependencies and impacts are location-specific and can be hidden beyond direct operations. LEAP gives organizations a coherent route from geographic screening to decisions and reporting, helping prevent a generic sector checklist from replacing place-based analysis. Its usefulness depends on appropriate expertise, stakeholder and rights-holder perspectives, value-chain coverage, data quality, and transparent treatment of uncertainty.
Example
A food company maps farms and processing sites, identifies operations near water-stressed and biodiversity-sensitive areas, evaluates dependencies on pollination and water and impacts from land use and nutrients, assesses operational and transition risks, and prepares responses, targets, governance, metrics, and TNFD disclosures. It records data gaps and revisits priority locations as supplier information improves.
References
Current status
- As of
- Issuer
- Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures
- Jurisdiction
- Global voluntary framework
- Instrument or version
- TNFD LEAP approach guidance v1.1
- Status
- This record follows TNFD’s LEAP guidance version 1.1 and the TNFD Recommendations available on 2026-08-13.
Applicability: LEAP is voluntary TNFD guidance rather than a certification or mandatory sequence. Organizations should apply it proportionately and disclose methods, data limitations, locations, value-chain coverage, and assessment choices.