Here's the thing. Chilean companies have spent years planting trees, protecting wetlands, and greening urban spaces. Most of them just refuse to call it what it is — or measure whether it works.
That is the central finding of the first NaturaInvest report, which reviewed 60 member companies of Acción Empresas and combed through 156 sustainability reports, annual memoranda, and corporate websites covering 2022–2024. Of those 60 firms, 34 had initiatives that could plausibly align with Nature-Based Solutions (NbS). Only four — Aguas Andinas, Anglo American, CMPC, and Colbún — explicitly embed the concept into their policies and strategies.
Four out of sixty. Read the changelog.
'These companies operate in sectors where nature is a critical and visible input — water, forestry, energy, mining — and they are exposed to international reporting frameworks,' said Alejandra Stehr, alternate director of NaturaInvest and academic at Universidad de Concepción. 'When nature stops being a reputational topic and becomes an operational risk, the concept appears.'
The gap is not about activity. It is about accountability. Stehr put it plainly: companies have been restoring forests and protecting wetlands for years, but they label it 'reforestation,' 'environmental compensation,' or 'community engagement.' Same action, different branding — and behind that naming difference is a structural problem: the inability to distinguish between initiatives with expected benefits and projects that can demonstrate verified, attributable results.
The report also flagged weaknesses in monitoring, financial continuity, governance, and impact measurement. In most cases, these initiatives live inside the sustainability department and never reach the investment committee or the risk matrix. That is where the real transformation has to happen, Stehr argued: 'Moving nature from the report chapter to the risk matrix and the investment plan. That means designing each initiative from the start with an objective, an intervened ecosystem, a baseline, indicators, a timeline, a monitoring mechanism, governance, and a financial owner. Not as an annex — the way any company asset is designed.'
The two standout examples are instructive. Aguas Andinas developed NbS as a direct response to prolonged drought threatening Santiago's water supply, including a 2025 aquifer recharge project on the Mapocho River that stored a volume close to one month's consumption for a municipality of roughly 47,000 people. Anglo American has moved from impact mitigation toward a net positive biodiversity target by 2030, with projects including Mediterranean forest rehabilitation at Las Tórtolas and a blue carbon pilot at Bahía Inglesa.
Both cases share the same logic: nature became a strategic tool only when it was tied to an operational risk that had a price tag.
Voltage's take: The free-market read here is not complicated. When companies are forced to internalize the real cost of water scarcity or biodiversity loss — because it threatens production, licensing, or long-term asset value — they act. The four firms that got there did so because the market signaled the risk, not because a sustainability report asked them nicely. The remaining 56 are still treating nature as a PR line item. That is not an environmental problem. It is a capital allocation problem, and the benchmarks will eventually catch up.
