The Nature of Business: What the IPBES Business Assessment Reveals About Biodiversity, Risk, and Corporate Action
IPBES Report Highlights Methods and more than 100 Specific Actions for Businesses, Governments, Financial Actors and Civil Society.
“Businesses risk extinction themselves unless they protect and restore the natural world, scientists across the globe are warning,”1 writes Helen Briggs, the BBC’s environment correspondent. Published the same week in The Guardian, the headline blunter still: “scientists believe we’re witnessing the largest loss of life since the dinosaurs, and it’s a risk to the global economy.” Then, in the following sentence, “It feels like groundhog day: another week, another warning about the seriousness of the biodiversity crisis. This time it was the financial sector’s turn.”2 One can almost viscerally hear the fatigue. To write about nature is to adopt the language of collapse.
They aren’t wrong – we should be stunned by the sheer scale of destruction. Yet in a crisis-saturated world, the magnitude of such numbers no longer necessarily shocks us, or prompts action.
Refreshingly, the major report these recent headlines point us to actually does not suggest a strategy designed to jolt executives into action by implying their value chains are teetering on the edge of oblivion, or reprimand patterns of overconsumption with slap after slap on the wrist. Approved by more than 150 governments, the “Business and Biodiversity” report—launched February 9 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an independent global body that assesses the state of biodiversity and ecosystem services for policymakers, offers a new set of key takeaways that, for once, do not sound like a broken record, or Groundhog Day.
The report says plainly: biodiversity loss is, and will continue to be, central to managing risk across the whole of the economy and throughout our societies. Then, it provides a systematic body of evidence, along with 100 specific actions to measure and respond to business impacts and dependencies on nature on every scale.
Perhaps the most compelling piece of the report is how directly it names why the current disconnect remains so strong: scientific literature is not often written for a business audience. Businesses currently spend more time trying to decipher competing frameworks for compliance and reporting than taking meaningful action. And the structure of quarterly earnings pressures, short investment horizons, performance benchmarking, and reporting cycles don’t necessarily align with ecological cycles.
“We are moving the conversation from voluntary sustainability pledges to a science-based roadmap for system change,” reflected Professor Stephen Polasky, co-chair of the assessment and a NatCap leader based at the University of Minnesota’s NatCap TEEMs. (Media Release: IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment) To learn more about what this “roadmap” entails, I spoke over Zoom with the co-executive director of the Stanford-based Natural Capital Alliance, Lisa Mandle, a coordinating lead author and co-author of Chapter 3 on Impact, shortly after the IPBES plenary session concluded. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed key themes of the report, and why coordinated action by governments, civil society, financial actors, and businesses is essential for moving forward.
Q: What’s your 2 minute spiel about why the IPBES report matters?
A: The report really has a few key findings. One is that it continues to document the challenges the world faces with declines in biodiversity and nature, and outlines the role that businesses play — how they all impact and depend on nature. Then, it says….okay what can or should we do with that understanding? What can businesses do, but also governments and civil society and other groups, to bring better alignment between what is good for business and what is good for nature and society.
Q: What makes this report important or differentiates it from other studies that might have looked at these links between nature and business before?
A: What’s new about this report is that it synthesizes the evidence on the linkages between nature and business, it is backed by a global group of experts, and then endorsed or approved by the over 150 country governments. It’s a strong roadmap.
Q: Can you give us an example of how a business might depend on biodiversity or nature?
A: Yeah, there’s a range of the degree for how direct that dependence is. So, a farmer is going to depend on nature in some very direct ways, in terms of soil health, potentially pollination for the crop that’s growing, the diversity of the crop species in general. But all businesses do depend on nature. Sometimes, it’s through the value chain, but it’s also in terms of the regulating benefits of nature. Take your local coffee shop. That coffee shop is going to depend on biodiversity in part for the coffee that it serves, the pollinators that contribute to the coffee, and the clean water it needs to make coffee.
This was really made clear a couple months ago when here in the Bay Area there were really big king tides. Nature is also going to protect that coffee shop, potentially, from flooding or from other sorts of natural disasters: for example, by absorbing stormwater, so that the coffee shop itself doesn’t flood, or that the roads that serve it don’t flood so that customers can access it, or the suppliers can access that shop. So there’s a whole range of ways in which businesses really depend on nature to be able to operate.
Q: If I was an executive, or somebody in the private sector, what is the key takeaway that I should be thinking about?
A: That there's something in here for almost any kind of business. Every business impacts and depends on nature. Some businesses are well aware of this, some are not. Depending on where a business is and its journey related to thinking about nature, starting with real evidence and a framework for thinking about what its impacts are – but also its dependencies – on nature can be a really useful starting point. The report provides a guide to thinking about what methods and approaches can be used.
It clearly shows that these impacts and dependencies on nature translate to real risks. Some of these risks are more direct for businesses, but also, long-term inaction poses systemic risks. We make clear how conditions in which businesses operate will change and impact their ability to continue to operate.
Q: How might a business choose the “best path” forward?
A: There’s been a proliferation of methods and metrics to use to measure both impacts and dependencies of businesses or other parts of society on nature. One thing that is clear is that there’s not just one way to measure impacts or dependencies on nature, and there’s not going to ever be just one metric, given the many dimensions of biodiversity and the many ways nature’s contributions to people or ecosystem services support people and support businesses.
What is new is that the report identifies a framework for thinking through what methods are going to be fit for purpose, given the kind of decision being made by the business.For example, businesses might be making very site-level decisions about their other operations, and the report lays out what kind of information they might need to draw on to be informed about the potential impact on/dependency on biodiversity or nature at that site.
But that same business or other kinds of businesses might also be making decisions on corporate strategy, or about portfolios, and those kinds of decisions need more wide-ranging information about nature across a larger geographic area, which requires a different set of approaches. We refer to those as top-down approaches. So modeling is one way to do this – it might be coarser information, but provides bigger, broader geographic coverage to kind of inform those kinds of decisions.
Q: At NatCap, we have one sort of tool and suite of ways to help decision-makers gather this information (InVEST). Could you talk a little bit about how NatCap fits into this puzzle?
A: Our InVEST software is a free, open-source geospatial software for mapping and quantifying values of nature across a range of ecosystem services. If we map the InVEST software onto the framework within the IPBES assessment, it would fit in as a spatial method that relies on top-down data. InVEST has been run globally, and across large regions. It could be run at a landscape or site level, but we often say it’s not meant for very detailed site-level information. So the report outlines when a tool like InVEST might be most useful for supporting your business, how it can help mapping understanding of impacts and dependencies (or determining investment strategies), whether it is at a high level to screen different sites that are under consideration, or to identify areas in a landscape that are hotspots for ecosystem services that a business might impact or depend on, or to compare options or track change in levels of ecosystem service provision over time.
Q: Was there anything that surprised you about this work over the past three years?
A: Yeah, one of the things that is clear from the report, which is something that I think is really useful to have articulated as clearly as it is, is that there are many things that businesses can do right now that are good for the business and good for nature. Yet, even direct actions that are both good for business and nature, under current conditions, are not going to be sufficient to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. There needs to be a change in these conditions. That’s what we call an enabling environment, the context in which business operates, and how to make that context one in which the incentives for business align with what is good for nature and for society. To get there, that’s not something that businesses can do alone. It’s going to take action by the government, by civil society, by financial actors as well.
Q: When you think about this report being published, what does success look like to you?
A: The report provides more than 100 different actions organized by different actors that, again, governments, civil society, businesses, and others can take to move towards an enabling environment. Our message is these don’t all have to happen at once, but we outline which actions can happen, and how this partly depends on the context: the kind of business, the government structure, etc really will shape what actions are most appropriate. Success, I think, looks like seeing the way that businesses talk about and act on their relationship to nature changing.
By the Numbers – Key Statistics and Findings from the Report
$1.18 trillion-$130.11 trillion: Growth of the global economy between 1820 and 2022 (in 2011 dollars).
+100% vs -40%: Average per capita increase in human-produced capital since 1992, versus reduction in stocks of natural capital.
$7.3 trillion: Global public and private finance flows in 2023 with directly negative impacts on nature, of which private finance accounted for $4.9 trillion, with public spending on environmentally harmful subsidies of about $2.4 trillion
$220 billion: Global public and private finance flows directed in 2023 to activities contributing to the conservation and restoration of biodiversity.
<1%: Publicly reporting companies that mention biodiversity impacts in their reports.
60%: Share of Indigenous lands globally threatened by industrial development.
25%: Share of Indigenous territories under high pressure from resource exploitation.
At least 8: Number of countries (along with the European Union) in which central banks have analysed their financial institutions’ exposure to dependencies on biodiversity.
IPBES (2026). Summary for Policymakers of the Methodological Assessment Report on the Impact and Dependence of Business on Biodiversity and Nature’s Contributions to People. Jones M., Polasky S., Rueda X., Brooks S., Carter Ingram J., Egoh B. N., von Hase A., Kohsaka R., Kulak M., Leach K., Loyola R., Mandle L., Rodriguez-Osuna V., Schaafsma M. and Sonter L. J. (eds.). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15369060
About IPBES: Often described as the “IPCC for biodiversity”, IPBES is an independent intergovernmental body comprising more than 150 member Governments. Established by Governments in 2012, it provides policymakers with objective scientific assessments about the state of knowledge regarding the planet’s biodiversity, ecosystems and the contributions they make to people, as well as the tools and methods to protect and sustainably use these vital natural assets. For more information about IPBES and its assessments visit www.ipbes.net3
Briggs, Helen. “Businesses face extinction unless they protect nature, major report warns.” BBC, Feb 2026.
Greenfield, Patrick. “Businesses must take responsibility for biodiversity loss – for their sake as much as ours.” The Guardian, Feb 13, 2026
Image credit: Chunyip Wong