Making Value‐Chain Risks Visible: Extending ENCORE for Systemic Insights

ABSTRACT Businesses in all sectors, including downstream segments, depend on biodiversity and the ecosystem services it sustains, yet firms also exert pressures that accelerate biodiversity loss. The latter generates material risks for both companies and their financial stakeholders. Mapping corporate dependencies and pressures on nature is therefore critical to mitigating risks and halting biodiversity decline. Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure (ENCORE) is a leading framework for assessing business–nature linkages. However, ENCORE primarily reflects direct operations, leading to a potential underestimation of corporate pressures and dependencies connected to value chains. This paper provides a descriptive review of current ENCORE applications by businesses and financial institutions and identifies methodological constraints related to value‐chain integration. It then introduces an approach to highlight upstream exposures, thus extending ENCORE's utility. By making such previously hidden exposures visible, our approach enables more in‐depth screening to support improved double materiality assessments, sustainability strategies and risk management.