Back in 2022, a small eco-friendly beauty brand called Faith in Nature did something that, as far as we can tell, no UK company had done before. They appointed nature to their board of directors. They did this through a "Nature Guardian", a non-executive director (NED) role specifically designed to give nature a legal voice in corporate decision-making, whose job is to make sure the board actually thinks about what its decisions do to the environment. It’s radical, but might also be one of the more important governance experiments happening in UK business right now.
Beyond Section 172: Moving Nature from consideration to a stakeholder
This matters because of a key element that drives UK corporate governance. Under Section 172 of the Companies Act 2006, directors have to promote the success of the company for the benefit of shareholders. They're supposed to "have regard to" things like the environment, employees, and the wider community. But "having regard to" is not the same thing as being accountable to.
Fenella Chambers, a purpose-led governance legal expert at Hogan Lovells, speaking to us for our 'Purpose by Design' research, puts it pretty bluntly: "It is shareholder primacy, whilst having to consider those other elements. But it's shareholder primacy that ultimately wins out." So in most boardrooms, nature is just a consideration. Faith in Nature made it a stakeholder, and that distinction matters.
They amended their Articles of Association to create a legal responsibility for directors to "use its best endeavors to have a positive impact on nature as a whole, and minimize the prospect of any harmful impact of the business and operations on nature." This is a legally enforceable objective that is applied to how the company actually operates.
How a nature voice changes boardroom decision-making
What's really interesting about the Faith in Nature model isn't just the principle behind it. It's what happened in practice.
Once nature had a formal voice in board deliberations, the tone and substance of discussions changed. Environmental consequences started being weighed alongside commercial ones. Instead of being a drag on potential benefits to shareholders, maintaining our environment becomes another benefit stream to work towards.
Crucially, this didn't need every director to buy in for it to work. Just having one structurally different, legitimate voice altered how trade-offs were framed. They put a voice in the room that can't just be overridden when it's commercially inconvenient, which shifts the whole dynamic of the conversation. This has played out in our own experience working with clients. When governance materially changes, the outcome of decision-making also changes.
Construct or contrivance
If you're skeptical, you might ask whether appointing a "Nature Director" is just an artificial construct.
Emma Clancy, Head of Strategy, Sustainability and Group Transformation at Severn Trent, and one of the 50+ experts we interviewed for our recent report, has a good answer to that: "It might feel like an artificial construct to create something like a nature director on the board, but until thinking about broad stakeholder interests becomes an ingrained organizational habit, we need to do that. We have to create mechanisms to make purpose happen."
The structures we build create the behaviors we get. If the boardroom is set up to optimize financial returns above everything else, that's exactly what it'll do. Clancy frames this as transitional, though. "Ultimately, the question is whether we continue to rely on these external constructs, or if we can successfully foster the inherent behaviors where everyone thinks about purpose in the same integrated way they currently think about health and safety."
That's the aspiration: a world where evaluating environmental impact is as instinctive and non-negotiable as a health and safety assessment. However, until such a state is achieved, the established framework remains necessary.
The rise of the nature director
Faith in Nature isn't doing this alone. House of Hackney, the luxury interiors brand, has legally appointed "Mother Nature" and "Future Generations" as directors, which ensures boardroom accountability stays focused on the regenerative and long-term. Riversimple, the hydrogen car company, has gone further still. They've structured their governance around six custodians who hold voting shares, each one representing a different part of modern life: the Environment, Customers, Community, Staff, Investors, and Commercial Partners. No single stakeholder interest, including profit, can just quietly override the rest.
And behind these individual companies, there's a collective of legal professionals called Lawyers for Nature who are building frameworks to help businesses change their constitutions to recognize nature as a rights-bearing stakeholder. Essentially, giving ecological interests legal protection against short-term commercial pressure.
Embedding structural resilience
As we found in our recent report, purpose that isn't embedded in governance is just borrowed from whoever's in charge at the time. This is the Purpose Trap. If purpose is not supported by governance, it will be set aside as soon as the first challenge or material investment decision occurs.
Faith in Nature's Nature Guardian is a structural answer to a structural problem, and it signals that purpose isn't some peripheral concern but actually integral to how governance works. It helps boards start to internalize broader responsibilities before those responsibilities get codified into wider formal structures.
Ultimately, we don't question the legitimacy of a Finance Director representing the interests of capital. So why does a Nature Director feel like a contrivance, and what does that discomfort tell us about whose interests we've normalized?
At Clarasys, we're helping organizations of all types embed purpose into their governance systems. This doesn't mean you have to put nature on your board, but it does mean realistically looking at how to bring purpose from a high-minded ideal championed by individuals to a structurally resilient framework embedded in your organization. You can learn more about our purpose and impact consulting services here.
References
All expert quotes featured in this article were captured during original research for the Clarasys report: Purpose by Design: Ownership, Governance, and the Future of Business (2026) (https://clarasys.com/insights/reports/purpose-by-design-ownership-governance-and-the-future-of-business).
Interviews were conducted between May and November 2025 with 50+ investors and business leaders from a broad range of sectors.