---
title: every company depends on places it does not own
canonical_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/every-company-depends-on-places-it-does-not-own
markdown_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/every-company-depends-on-places-it-does-not-own.md
subtitle: a company is a group with a balance sheet — and a people account like any other
category: nature-finance
---

# every company depends on places it does not own

*a company is a group with a balance sheet — and a people account like any other*

**A nature dependency is a way a company's operations rely on a living system** — water from an aquifer, bees that pollinate a crop, soil that holds a slope, a wetland that soaks up a flood before it reaches the warehouse. An orchard depends on the bees. A bottling plant depends on the aquifer under it. A hydropower dam depends on the snowpack upstream.

A dependency runs the other way from an impact. **An impact is what a company does to nature. A dependency is what nature does for the company.** Most corporate sustainability work started with impacts: emissions, waste, land cleared. Dependencies get less attention, and they are where an operation is exposed.

The orchard, the aquifer, and the snowpack exist and keep working whether or not anyone writes them into a risk register. [**Ensurance**](/?from=guide) is how a living system someone names gets funded to keep working. It is not the aquifer.

## the established ways to map it

Two tools carry most of the work, and both come before anything in this post.

**TNFD's LEAP approach.** The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures publishes LEAP as a way for a company to work through its relationship with nature in four phases: **Locate** where the business meets nature, **Evaluate** its dependencies and impacts, **Assess** the risks and opportunities that follow, and **Prepare** to respond and report. TNFD describes it as iterative guidance, not a mandated process.

**ENCORE.** Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure is a free tool developed by Global Canopy, UNEP FI and UNEP-WCMC. It screens sectors and production processes for the ecosystem services they depend on and the pressures they put on nature. Companies often use it in LEAP's Locate and Evaluate phases to see where their high dependencies are likely to be. Its results are sector-level, so a company still has to check them against its own sites.

If your organization is starting on nature dependency, start there. The rest of this post adds two things those tools do not set out to do: a short way to talk about how hard a dependency bites, and a way to give the living system itself an address.

## a five-step scale for how hard it bites

Inside the protocol, we sort dependencies by what happens to an operation if the living system degrades. This is **our scale, not a standard**. It is a working shorthand, not a substitute for LEAP or ENCORE, and the examples are generic on purpose.

| level | what happens if the living system degrades | generic example |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Operations stop | A bottling plant with one aquifer as its only source |
| 4 | Revenue falls | A river outfitter whose season depends on summer flows |
| 3 | Costs rise | A water treatment plant cleaning more sediment after fire burns the slopes above its intake |
| 2 | Rules and disclosure bite | A firm with a water permit, or a reporting duty, tied to a river's condition |
| 1 | Reputation suffers | A brand whose story leans on a landscape it does not operate in |

Read it from the living system outward. The question is never "how green is this company." It is "if this aquifer, this pollinator, or this wetland stopped working, what would happen inside the company the next quarter."

## the company as a people account

In the people leg, a company is a group. It has members, a way to decide, and a place where money sits — the same four things any small group has, with a balance sheet attached. In law a company is often a legal person in its own right. The account changes none of that and adds no legal status; in this model a company is people at the size of a balance sheet.

:::johnson
**a company is a group with a balance sheet.**

The same account shape holds for one person, a crew, a company, and a town. Only the grain changes: more people confirm, and the decisions run through the company's own governance.

[see what a named place depends on →](/explore?from=guide)
:::

The ladder looks like this, with live accounts at the sizes that have them on 26 Oct 2026:

| size | live example |
|---|---|
| One person | [tmo.earth](/tmo.earth?from=guide) |
| A community of growers and planters | [.tgn](/groups/tgn?from=guide), 114 accounts |
| A city name | [.boulder](/groups/boulder?from=guide), 33 accounts, made in the protocol — the city is not a member |

The shape is the same at each rung. What changes is who confirms. One person confirms alone. A company confirms through officers and policies it already has, and nothing in an account bypasses them.

## the places a company depends on, owned or not

A company's people account matters less than the edges from it. People→place: the places a company depends on are rarely the places it owns. A plant owns its fence line. Its water comes from a reach, a watershed, and a basin, each drawn by water rather than by deed. All three sizes can hold an account. For example, for a plant in the Colorado basin:

| size | what the company depends on | live place account |
|---|---|---|
| A reach | The stretch of river at the intake | [crystal-river.basin](/crystal-river.basin?from=guide) |
| A watershed | The tributaries and snowpack that feed it | [roaring-fork-river.basin](/roaring-fork-river.basin?from=guide) |
| A basin | The river system that sets supply for everyone downstream | [colorado-river.basin](/colorado-river.basin?from=guide) |

People→purpose is the other edge. The plant does not depend on one place only; it depends on water continuing to arrive, which is a purpose: [water-abundance.ensurance](/water-abundance.ensurance?from=guide). An orchard's purpose is [pollination.ensurance](/pollination.ensurance?from=guide). A farm's is [healthy-soils.ensurance](/healthy-soils.ensurance?from=guide). These accounts are addresses for the living system. They are not holdings, and an account page is not evidence of a balance.

Naming those edges does not give a company any say over the basin. Several accounts can serve the same river. The irrigation districts, tribes, towns, land trusts, and watershed councils who already keep it go on keeping it, under the rules they already have. The account sits beside them.

## why the address matters

A LEAP assessment ends in a response and a report: here is what we depend on, how exposed we are, and what we will do. That is necessary work. What a report cannot do is receive anything. The aquifer appears in a report as a line. Water funds and watershed-payment programs already take corporate money for it; an account is one more address beside them.

An account is the other half. It is a public ledger entry with an address for the living system itself, so whoever depends on it — a company, a town, a person — has a place where funding for that system can land and be seen. The disclosure says what the company depends on. The account is where the thing it depends on can be kept.

For more on how corporations use the protocol, see [ensurance for corporations](/solutions/corporations?from=guide&topic=ppp-people). The next post goes up a size again, to the people who share a whole place: [a town is people who share a place](/guide/a-town-is-people-who-share-a-place?from=guide). If you want to think through a dependency with someone, [write to us](/contact?from=guide&topic=ppp-people).

## frequently asked questions

### what is a nature dependency?

A nature dependency is a way a company's operations rely on a living system, such as water supply, pollination, soil, or flood control. It is the reverse of an impact, which is what the company does to nature. TNFD's LEAP approach and the ENCORE tool are the established ways to map dependencies.

### what is the difference between a nature impact and a nature dependency?

An impact is a change a company causes in nature, such as clearing land or drawing down water. A dependency is a service the company needs from nature to keep operating. A company can have a small impact on a system it depends on heavily.

### is the 1 to 5 dependency scale a standard?

No. It is our own working shorthand for how hard a dependency bites, from reputation at 1 to operations stopping at 5. Use LEAP and ENCORE for assessment and disclosure.

## sources

[TNFD, LEAP approach](https://tnfd.global/) — the Locate, Evaluate, Assess, Prepare guidance for identifying and assessing nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks, and opportunities

[ENCORE](https://encorenature.org/) — Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure, developed by Global Canopy, UNEP FI and UNEP-WCMC; screens sectors and production processes for nature-related dependencies and impacts

## the series

Six posts on one leg of the triad: people, from one person to a whole town.

1. [who counts as people?](/guide/who-counts-as-people?from=guide) — read first
2. [one person can hold an account](/guide/one-person-can-hold-an-account?from=guide)
3. [a small group is big enough](/guide/a-small-group-is-big-enough?from=guide)
4. **every company depends on places it does not own** — you are here
5. [a town is people who share a place](/guide/a-town-is-people-who-share-a-place?from=guide)
6. [place, purpose, people at any size](/guide/place-purpose-people-at-any-size?from=guide)

## the three series

Place, purpose, and people, each walked from the smallest size to the largest, after one question.

- [what counts as a place?](/guide/what-counts-as-a-place?from=guide) — the place series
- [what counts as a purpose?](/guide/what-counts-as-a-purpose?from=guide) — the purpose series
- [who counts as people?](/guide/who-counts-as-people?from=guide) — the people series
- [what do you want to ensure?](/guide/what-do-you-want-to-ensure?from=guide) — the question the three series start from