Authors : Julien Boucher and Riccardo De Gennaro, Earth Action, with Tatiana Fedotova and Lucie Gerber, LeafTurtle
At Earth Action, we believe the best sustainability work happens at the edges. Where different expertise meets, where measurement bumps into strategy, where a conversation forces you to sharpen your thinking.This article is one of those conversations.
We are sitting down with Tatiana Fedotova and Lucie Gerber from LeafTurtle, a strategic consultancy working on water, biodiversity, and nature. We do different things, but with the same spirit.
Earth Action works across the full chain from measurement to action: science-based footprinting, LCA, dataset development, and strategic guidance on plastics, carbon, packaging, and microfibers. Riccardo De Gennaro, who co-authors this piece, leads our water and microfiber data work — including building corporate-level datasets from scratch in areas where no usable data previously existed. LeafTurtle focuses on action, bringing deep specialisation in water and nature strategy. Lucie Gerber and Tatiana Fedotova specialize in stakeholder engagement, governance design, and roadmaps that translate evidence into decisions organisations can act on.
And in a world where too many companies are trapped between “we need better data” and “we need a clearer strategy” before we act, the connection between measurement and action matters.
Both teams work with companies navigating water stress, biodiversity dependencies, and nature-related risks. Both have watched well-intentioned organisations loop endlessly in analysis, waiting for a perfect picture that never comes. The biggest risk is not acting on imperfect data. It is not acting at all.
What follows is a candid exchange about what is holding companies back on water and nature, and what it takes to move.
On the most common mistake – What is the most common mistake you see companies make when they address their water or nature footprint?
Lucie Gerber, Co-founder & Stakeholder Engagement Lead, LeafTurtle
We saw the ‘manage what you measure’ principle pushed to its limits: teams are built around perfecting the data and analysis, and the move towards implementation is challenging.
Part of the reason is that translating environmental data into business language and KPIs requires facing potentially disruptive change. That is uncomfortable. And it is much harder if sustainability sits in its own silo rather than being integrated into business strategy. Other factors compound this: the complexity of the challenge, lack of internal buy-in, misalignment with company culture. The list is long.
What it shows is that, in the end, it really comes down to the people and to systemic thinking, more than to the data. Companies can start acting on what’s available, refining as they go and rely on industry standards. Waiting for certainty is itself a strategic choice.
The ultimate thing to unlock real momentum? Commitment from leadership. It is not a small thing, but it is by far the most important one.
Reporting is a good illustration. When it is treated as a compliance exercise, whole teams get mobilised to collect the requested metrics and get through the audit. When it is treated as a strategic lever, the same process helps design data governance and sharpen priorities. Same effort, completely different outcomes. And only one bring actual business robustness.
Julien Boucher, Co-Founder, Earth Action
Companies get stuck asking ‘do we have enough data to start?’ The answer is always no, because perfect data does not exist. Our job is to build the best possible picture from what is available, identify hotspots, and move.
The mistake we see most often is the data collection happening in the wrong order. Companies spend months gathering granular, precise data across the whole scope, then go straight into a deep-dive assessment built on all of it. It feels rigorous. It is actually a waste of the company’s time. The better sequence is the reverse: start with a screening assessment on imperfect data. It takes a fraction of the time to assemble, and it tells you where your hotspots are. Once you know that, you know exactly where better data is worth the effort and where it genuinely is not. Perfect data does not need to exist everywhere in the system. It needs to exist where the hotspots are, and you only find out where those are once you have looked at the whole picture, even roughly.
And if I am honest, the data gap is sometimes used deliberately. It gives companies a way to participate in research, look engaged, and still defer action. Regulation is starting to change that calculus. But companies that keep waiting will face much bigger transitions when the moment comes.
| “The data gap is sometimes used deliberately. It gives companies a way to look engaged and still defer action.” — Julien Boucher |
How the “doing the right thing” argument changed
‘Doing the right thing’ used to be enough to justify sustainability investment. Is that still true — and if not, what is the argument that actually lands with companies today?
Julien Boucher, Co-Founder, Earth Action
‘Doing the right thing’ is no longer the pitch that moves budgets. Every topic we work on — water, plastic, microfibers — is a significant risk vector: supply chain risk, litigation risk, regulatory risk. That is the conversation that gets the CFO into the room.
We are actively reframing our own narrative. Less ‘reduce your footprint for the planet’, more ‘understand where your exposure is and build robustness into your operations before it is forced on you.’ The analysis is the same. The door it opens is different.
Water is a perfect example. Companies with water-intensive supply chains in stressed regions are sitting on enormous operational risk, already materializing. A water footprint assessment is not an altruistic exercise. It is a risk map.
And regulation has not gone away. It has been delayed in some areas. But the companies that acted early on CSRD are in a better position today regardless of what has been simplified. The underlying risks have not changed.
Tatiana Fedotova, Co-founder & Strategy Lead, LeafTurtle
Our conviction that doing good for the planet and doing good for business is one and the same thing has not changed. It is true thought, that the last 18 months have seen those two sides fracture in the public conversation. As a result, sustainability has taken a back seat in today’s world. Sadly, in certain geopolitical contexts, the risks are higher for companies that choose to push forward anyway: rather than being rewarded, they may face penalties instead, reduced investment, or even sanctions.
That does not make the operational and financial risks from natural resource shortages, climate impacts, and pollution disappear. They keep growing.
We define robustness as business continuity and economic viability in a world where seven out of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed. A recent UN report shifted its language from water ‘crisis’ to water ‘bankruptcy’. That is not a temporary shock. It is a persistent failure where natural capital has been widely damaged.
Building robustness requires more than a risk map. It requires a vision for a business that is integrated in its social and environmental ecosystem — not separated from it. That means systemic understanding of the challenges and trust and collaboration across teams, with value chain partners, and with local communities. This is what we help our clients build.
The regulatory slowdown makes the point clearly. Companies that treated compliance as their main driver have gained some time. But regulation is coming back, and the underlying risks keep compounding. Short-term gains will not offset a much higher bill later.
| “We define robustness as business continuity and economic viability in a world where seven out of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed.” — Tatiana Fedotova |
On how to make sense of the multiplicity of the topics – Water, biodiversity, and climate keep bleeding into each other in your projects. Can you give a concrete example — and why does it matter for how companies should be thinking about strategy?
Lucie Gerber, Co-founder & Stakeholder Engagement Lead, LeafTurtle
We recently worked with a food company on an integrated impact and risk screening across climate, water, and biodiversity, including spatial analysis and stakeholder engagement for key sourcing countries. What struck us was the gap between how the interconnections were understood at corporate level versus what producers on the ground were actually dealing with. For local farmers, the operational constraint was water, full stop.
The strategic recommendation shifted as a result: frame water as the entry point into broader landscape and sourcing resilience, rather than running three parallel programmes.
That framing made the strategy legible across the organisation. We see similar dynamics in one of our projects in Tanzania. Bring together actors with different mandates and priorities, and discussions on water inevitably open up into broader questions of governance: who decides, who is accountable, who bears the cost.
The pattern repeats everywhere we look: pull on one thread, and the others follow. Companies default to siloed teams and separate KPIs because that is what is manageable, but it means the connections often get missed at exactly the level where decisions get made. This is why governance matters so much.
What companies consistently discover when they do this kind of integrated work is that everything is connected. It sounds obvious. But truly integrated strategies are still rare, partly because the tools to support them are still being built — integrated impact databases, holistic risk modelling, KPIs that do not force a choice between climate and biodiversity. That is a challenge for all of us, and something EA and LeafTurtle share a stake in solving.
| “The strategic recommendation shifted as a result: frame water as the entry point into broader landscape and sourcing resilience, rather than running three parallel programmes.” – Lucie Gerber |
Riccardo De Gennaro, Water & Microfiber Data, Earth Action
Lucie’s point about missed connections is exactly what we run into on the data side, just with different consequences. When you optimise for one variable without modelling the system, you can solve water and inadvertently break something on land.
The microfiber work is a clear case. The corporate-level datasets we built were meant to track fiber emissions into water, and the obvious fix companies reached for was end-of-pipe treatment, mainly tertiary wastewater filtration. Once we modelled it at full scope, the data told a different story: that treatment does not eliminate the fibers, it relocates them to land via sludge. Solve for water, and you have created a land problem you were not measuring.
Plastics in agriculture follow the same logic. Single-use irrigation materials degrade into soil and waterways at the same time, so water quality and biodiversity move together whether you are tracking that or not. We are now building methodology to make that visible at corporate level, because right now most companies are optimising against a partial picture without knowing it.
Julien Boucher, Co-Founder, Earth Action
Lucie and Riccardo are describing the same failure mode from two different vantage points: an organisational one, a technical one. The conclusion is the same either way. You cannot manage water, climate, and biodiversity in sequence, fix one, then move to the next, because the system does not wait for you to finish.
What that means practically is that the entry point matters more than the scope. You will rarely have the resources to tackle all three issues with equal depth from day one. But if you choose your entry point with the system in view, rather than picking the easiest metric to report, the work you do on that one issue starts pulling the others into focus rather than pushing them out of frame.
On where to start
If a company came to you tomorrow wanting to act on water and nature but did not know where to start — what is your first piece of advice?
Tatiana Fedotova & Lucie Gerber, LeafTurtle
A screening-level footprint and risk assessment is the right starting point. It identifies hotspots, prioritises strategic direction, and tells you where to dig deeper with a specific purpose in mind rather than for its own sake. A benchmark of industry peers and industry standards is also useful early on, to understand where you stand and where others are finding traction.
Getting a clear picture of impact hotspots and risk trends for your own sites and sourced materials that represent a significant share of business value is good enough to start moving. You do not need more than that to take the first meaningful steps.
What lays solid foundations from the start is embedding collaborative practices across teams from the very first data collection exercises: HSE, procurement, production, risk management, finance. When sustainability teams work through the initial steps in isolation, they almost always meet resistance further down the line. Starting with cross-functional ownership means the strategic conversations that follow are informed and shared, not imposed.
It also means that the issues need to be properly understood and shaped around each team’s reality — not handed down as abstract targets that feel disconnected from day-to-day operations. – Tatiana Fedotova
Julien Boucher, Co-Founder, Earth Action
Pick up the axe before you pick up the scalpel. You need a rough picture of where your biggest impacts and dependencies are — hotspots — before you can decide where to invest in better data. Start with a screening-level assessment.
A plastic footprint built on 80% primary data and 20% proxy is infinitely more useful than no footprint at all. It tells you where to look. Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the directional.
And frame it correctly internally. Do not pitch it as a sustainability initiative. Pitch it as a supply chain resilience audit. The analysis is identical. The door it opens with leadership is completely different.
For a fashion brand, the intersection of biggest environmental exposure and most material business risk is usually water and microfibers. For a food company, it is water stress in key sourcing regions and soil health. Start there.
| “Pick up the axe before you pick up the scalpel. A footprint built on 80% primary data and 20% proxy is infinitely more useful than no footprint at all.” — Julien Boucher |
On what neither can do without the other
You come from different angles — quantitative footprinting versus water and nature strategy and engagement. How do those fit together for a client, and what can you not do without the other?
Tatiana Fedotova & Lucie Gerber, LeafTurtle
Measurement without strategy provides the perception of progress. It can go on for a long time and absorb significant resources without actually derisking the business, driving innovation, or pivoting operations toward greater resilience. Strategy without measurement leads to decisions that are not grounded in what is material — which creates greenwashing and reputational risk. They are two sides of the same coin.
If a company’s journey on nature and water is an expedition, then EA and LeafTurtle’s work is complementary from the very first planning steps. EA produces the topographic survey: precise, rigorous, scientifically grounded. It tells you exactly what the terrain looks like. LeafTurtle is the expedition leader: reading the map in context, deciding the route, keeping the team moving, and knowing when conditions on the ground require a change of plan. The survey does not get anyone to the summit. But without it, you are navigating blind.
Julien Boucher, Co-Founder, Earth Action
A footprint without a strategy is a number that sits in a report. A strategy without footprint data is a plan built on instinct. Neither is enough.
The most powerful sustainability work happens when quantitative rigour and strategic thinking move together from the start, not sequentially. EA brings the numbers, the datasets, the scientific defensibility. What LeafTurtle brings — the stakeholder navigation, the business integration, the ‘what do we actually do with this’ — is what makes those numbers matter.
Moving forward
The companies building real resilience on water and nature are not waiting for a perfect dataset or a regulation to force their hand. They are picking a direction and moving — imperfect data and all.
What this conversation makes clear is that measurement and strategy are not a sequence. They are a partnership. The question of ‘where are my hotspots?’ and the question of ‘what do I do about them?’ need to be asked at the same time, by people who speak both languages.
If your organisation is at the beginning of that journey — or stuck somewhere in the middle — Earth Action and LeafTurtle are both open to a conversation.
About the contributors
Julien Boucher is co-founder and Head of Research of Earth Action. A scientist and systems thinker, he co-founded Quantis before creating Earth Action and is known for his work in Life Cycle Assessment, microplastics measurement, and plastic pollution reduction.
Riccardo De Gennaro leads water and microfiber data development at Earth Action. He built corporate-level microfiber emission datasets from the ground up for textile industry assessments, filling a gap where no usable data previously existed. He is currently developing methodology for plastics in agricultural irrigation.
Tatiana Fedotova is co-founder of LeafTurtle, a boutique consultancy specialising in water and nature strategy. She focuses on translating environmental complexity into business-relevant decisions, with expertise in water stewardship, supply chain activation, and corporate engagement.
Lucie Gerber is co-founder of LeafTurtle. She leads stakeholder engagement, governance design, and project delivery, working with food and agriculture, textile, and luxury companies as well as development cooperation institutions on complex multi-stakeholder projects with one goal: provide a clear direction and a sensible route.