That question — where will action matter most? — is one many enterprise sustainability strategies struggle to answer.

The Forbes Research 2025 State of Sustainability survey found that while 64% of C-suite leaders believe emerging technology is a key solution for driving sustainability goals, only 40% regularly measure their progress in achieving those objectives.

A long-running collaboration between HP Inc. and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has innovated to close that gap, evolving over more than 30 years and leading to 95% of HP brand paper and paper-based packaging now being certified by the Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®) as responsibly sourced.

Working together on conservation projects that span six landscapes across Brazil, Peru, Australia, China, Vietnam and Mexico as part of WWF's Forests Forward corporate engagement program, HP and WWF have advanced forest conservation across more than 600,000 acres, representing an area larger than London and New York City.

Global regulations are growing more complex and data intensive, says Jen Huffstetler, HP's chief sustainability officer and senior vice president of global product compliance and sustainability impact.

"Sustainability targets and goals have shifted to an operational mandate for most enterprises around the globe,” she says. “What we find is that technology is necessary for an enterprise to achieve its standard operational compliance and resilience."

Below, explore four strategies for enterprises to move sustainability investments from ambition to real impact.

Before a company can act, it needs to answer three questions: What risks do we face? How do they affect our business? And where can we best address them? WWF's free Risk Filter Suite lets a company use its location data and analyze where water and biodiversity risks — and dependencies on nature — concentrate across its operations and supply chains. The results show where those risks are most prominent within its footprint.

Knowing where risk sits is only half the equation. Answering that third question — where to act — is where the suite's newest tool, the Place-based Impact Estimator ( PIE ), comes in. PIE gives companies free location-specific guidance to screen and prioritize the areas where sustainability and business goals align. To access the new PIE tool, click HERE .

PIE combines multiple factors in every assessment — such as carbon sequestration potential, opportunities to improve species abundance, and the value of nearby agricultural land — to find where a single investment can deliver across all of them. Its premise: Priorities overlap. Ask a carbon specialist, a biodiversity scientist and an agronomist where to prioritize, and "you're going to get different answers," says Craig Beatty, WWF's manager of forest strategy and research, who built the tool.

PIE deliberately simplifies academic software that, as Beatty describes, sometimes demands "basically a doctorate in GIS."

"What we did with this tool was to lift it out of an academic world and take it into something that's much, much easier and manageable for people," he explains of PIE. The tool can generate maps at a resolution that most companies need for planning or evidence-based reporting and disclosure — from a countrywide view down to an area about the size of Manhattan — so a company can zoom from a broad regional picture into the specific locations where action would matter most.

According to Beatty, that kind of analysis is already shaping company decisions. He points to a major retailer exploring investments in regenerative agriculture for specialty crops in India that can't yet trace its supply chain to specific farms.

Using PIE, the company would be able to assess production areas in the states where it sources to identify sites where regenerative agriculture would deliver the greatest impact for carbon sequestration and species conservation, without competing with the highest-value agricultural land the local communities rely on.

For Beatty, that accessibility reflects how HP structured its support.

"HP gave us the intellectual freedom to try and answer a question that would get a broad range of people engaged in specific places that have the opportunity to deliver multiple outcomes for carbon, species, water and people," Beatty says.

For Huffstetler, the payoff continues to evolve.

"What makes it powerful is that it's bringing all that complex data together in a way that's accessible to enterprise leaders, and it doesn't require you to have that specialized expertise [in] GIS,” she says. “That's a terrific example of how technology helps [organizations] move beyond just good intentions."

#2: Monitor The Landscape

In Peru's Madre de Dios region, better restoration started with better information. There, the teams used drone mapping to assess nearly 22,240 acres — that's about 35 square miles, roughly the size of Miami — to identify the 865 acres where restoration could deliver the greatest impact. The maps show how land is being used, where forest patches remain, and where natural regeneration is most likely to succeed.

“That level of precision matters when resources are limited,” says Amelia Meadows, WWF’s lead for the HP partnership. “Rather than spreading restoration efforts across a landscape, the data can help direct investment toward places where it can reconnect jaguar habitat fragmented by agriculture and roads, restore soils, support forest regeneration, and strengthen ecological connectivity and water regulation.”

Meadows says monitoring doesn't stop at mapping. Camera traps and acoustic sensors generate millions of images and hours of audio, which are analyzed by AI to identify species at a scale that would otherwise take years to process. That data helps reveal which wildlife crossings are being used and which corridors jaguars rely on — turning raw observations into actionable insights for conservation.

The value of this data extends beyond wildlife. Many landowners in the region are cattle producers, and the same mapping can identify opportunities where restoring springs, forest cover and shade can benefit both ecosystems and livelihoods.

"Many of them are coming to find that with increased tree cover, their livestock are experiencing lower levels of stress related to heat because they have shade, and so their cattle are becoming healthier and more productive," Meadows says. "It's a little bit of a virtuous cycle."

In Australia, mapping and field data guide where to place custom-built nest boxes that offer a lifeline for endangered greater gliders, the country’s largest gliding marsupial whose century-old tree hollow homes have been threatened by logging and bushfires.

Remote sensing cameras record whether gliders actually move in. (They did, within weeks.) HP technology helps researchers analyze habitat and identify the right trees for installation, ensuring every climb up to 80 feet into the canopy has the best chance of giving gliders a new home.

"WWF field teams have shared how HP AI PCs help to conduct GIS mapping, habitat surveys [and] spatial analysis in remote locations, even when connectivity is limited," Huffstetler says. "Technology can make conservation work more practical, faster and support evidence-based outcomes."

WWF and HP are also exploring 3D-printed attachment solutions to secure the new innovative mycelium nest boxes that more closely replicate the structure and thermal properties of tree hollows providing immediate habitat for hollow-dependent wildlife while trees mature and develop their own natural hollows over the coming decades.

Another component of WWF and HP’s forest conservation work includes engagement with Indigenous communities historically removed from their ancestral lands. In Brazil, for example, they are partnering with federal agencies to cooperatively strengthen the management of protected areas and grow tourism in three national parks.

"All these [conservation] tools have been co-designed with the Indigenous communities," Meadows says, which she describes as central to "ensuring Indigenous Peoples are included in the parks’ management decisions and have a seat at the table."

Meadows explains that training compounds the effective use and adoption of the tools. Communities learning about park management technology are "also developing their own business plans to be able to assess how many visitors are coming to the park, what they are most interested in terms of attractions," she says — in some cases, seeding ethnotourism ventures that make protected areas economically self-sustaining.

In Brazil's Atlantic Forest , the partnership also supports technology upgrades to Espírito Santo's state-run Reflorestar program, which pays landowners to restore forest — extending impact well beyond the acres it funds directly.

In Australia, WWF and HP are also supporting Wadja Aboriginal Corporation's Indigenous Protected Area planning, monitoring and land management, including the provision of a laptop to complement other technologies used by Wadja in their work. From data analysis and management to mapping and on-ground monitoring tools such as trail cameras, these technologies are helping Traditional Owners strengthen their capacity to manage Country on their own terms.

Huffstetler says that, for enterprises, building that local capacity and engagement is key to making global goals executable.

"Our objectives are consistent globally, [but at the] implementation level, it needs to reflect the local realities," Huffstetler says. "The [WWF + HP] partnership allows us to tailor to the local ecological, social and regulatory conditions [while] remaining aligned on our shared outcomes."

The payoff is resilience communities and supply chains share. "The ability to come back from shocks is critical," Meadows says, pointing to fire, heat, drought and extreme rains across every landscape where the teams work. "The more nature degrades, the less able people are to withstand these extremes."

#4: Scale With New Technology

The partnership's next act is turning site-level wins into comparable, portfolio-wide evidence. One of the instruments used for this is environmental DNA (eDNA) — first piloted in Brazil and now rolling out across the partnership's landscapes over the next four to five years.

"Essentially what eDNA can do is tell you what species are present in a place by a sample," Beatty says. "We can sequence DNA from taking an air or soil or water sample … and it'll sort through and deliver a list of species in a place."

Run against reference databases with machine learning, a single sample can surface thousands of species, "from the smallest bacteria, microorganisms and invertebrates to fish, birds and mammals. It can help you assess if the trophic chain is all there," Meadows says. "It helps identify everything from endangered species, the impacts of climate change, different threats from pathogens, and the overall health of both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems."

Right now, eDNA shows presence rather than abundance — but the combination makes a full baseline fast and affordable rather than a years-long census, Beatty says.

"PIE helps you screen places that are interesting," he explains. "eDNA really is useful in understanding, in a project context, where you’re starting and what impact you’re having."

In Vietnam, where teams are integrating native trees back into acacia plantations, an eDNA baseline means that "after three to five years of interplanting with native species … you can come back and measure how the presence of biodiversity has changed and, hopefully, improved," according to Meadows.

"A lot of times, the important questions for companies are: ‘Have we achieved the impact we intended? When are we done?’” she says. "It used to be that you could say, 'I planted a tree and look at the benefits.’ Now, with increasing requirements on companies to measure and report impact, you need to validate the things that you say are happening."

Through WildinSync , a global initiative co-led by WWF, that measurement layer is being standardized across countries. Huffstetler wants the same consistency for enterprise measurement with methodologies aligned to such a scale worldwide that "people are able to take trust in those results, whether they're in that partnership or not."

A Blueprint For Compounding The Future Impact Of Enterprise Sustainability

In sequence — decide, monitor, build, scale — the four strategies turn a sustainability budget into something rarer: a defensible account of what changed because of it.

"Tools like eDNA or PIE, they're just part of an emerging set of capabilities that help organizations better understand the ecosystems … to monitor the outcomes and to make their investments with greater confidence, knowing that the ROI that they're seeking will be there," Huffstetler says.

Back in Madre de Dios, that confidence manifests as a forest corridor coming back together, cattle grazing in new shade, or a jaguar's passage confirmed not by hope but by data. As Huffstetler explains, maximizing sustainability impact is less about acquiring specific technology and more about innovating ways to measure and track where sustainability initiatives are having the biggest impact.

"Sustainability, technology, business value — they're just increasingly interconnected, and nature is a foundational part of business resilience for our products, supply chains, customers, communities," she says. "We all rely on healthy natural systems, and partnerships like HP and WWF show what's possible when conservation science, business scale and technology come together to deliver practical, measurable impact for nature, communities and our customers."