The scientific community has delivered its verdict on business and biodiversity, and the findings demand attention from anyone responsible for long-term business viability.
In February 2026, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released its methodological assessment on business impacts and dependencies on biodiversity. This represents the most comprehensive scientific evaluation to date of how businesses interact with nature—and what that means for operational risk, financial stability, and competitive positioning.
For those managing risk, strategy, or sustainability functions, this assessment provides critical intelligence: the methods exist today to measure your biodiversity relationships, the risks are material and growing, and the businesses that act first will gain substantial advantages.
The numbers frame the urgency. Between 1820 and 2022, the global economy expanded from $1.18 trillion to $130.11 trillion. During just the past 30 years, human-produced capital increased 100% per capita while natural capital—the ecosystems and resources that underpin economic activity—declined nearly 40%.
This isn’t an environmental issue. It’s a systemic economic risk that creates exposure across three categories:
Physical risks emerge when ecosystems that businesses depend on degrade or collapse. Agricultural yields drop when pollinator populations decline. Water-intensive operations face disruption when watershed degradation affects flow and quality. Coastal facilities experience increased storm damage as mangroves and coral reefs disappear.
Transition risks arise as policies, regulations, and market conditions shift. Businesses face new disclosure requirements, reformed subsidies, restricted access to resources, and changing consumer preferences. These transitions are accelerating globally.
Systemic risks threaten entire economic systems when biodiversity loss reaches tipping points. Central banks in eight countries and the European Union have identified nature-related financial risk as material to financial stability—not a future concern, but a present reality.
This assessment examined methodological approaches for measuring business impacts and dependencies on biodiversity. The work involved hundreds of scientists from dozens of countries conducting peer-reviewed analysis of existing research, methods, and business practices.
The core questions addressed:
The scope is practical, not theoretical. The assessment evaluates actual measurement approaches currently in use, identifies which work for different business contexts, and specifies what additional development is needed.
Every business depends on nature, though most don’t recognize the full extent of these dependencies.
Dependencies fall into three categories defined by the assessment as “nature’s contributions to people”:
Material contributions include genetic resources, raw materials, water, and energy. These are typically well-understood by businesses that directly extract or process natural resources. Agricultural companies know they depend on soil and water. Pharmaceutical companies recognize their dependence on genetic diversity for drug development.
Regulating contributions include climate regulation, water purification, pollination, pest control, soil formation, and disaster risk reduction. These are poorly understood by most businesses despite being fundamental to operations. Manufacturing facilities depend on stable water flows regulated by intact watersheds. Agricultural operations depend on pollination services worth hundreds of billions annually. Coastal infrastructure depends on storm protection from mangroves and wetlands.
Non-material contributions include recreation, education, cultural identity, and spiritual values. Service industries, tourism operators, and companies whose brands connect to nature depend on these contributions, often without measuring or managing them.
The assessment documents dependencies across all business sectors. Technology companies depend on rare earth minerals and water for cooling. Financial institutions depend on stable agricultural and resource sectors that depend on functioning ecosystems. Retailers depend on supply chains that depend on biodiversity at multiple points.
Central banks have begun quantifying these dependencies at portfolio level. Their analyses show that even sectors considered “low impact”—like finance and services—have substantial dependencies through their value chains and investments.
Business activities contribute to all five direct drivers of biodiversity change identified in previous IPBES assessments:
Impacts can be direct (a mine removing habitat), indirect (agricultural chemicals affecting downstream ecosystems), or cumulative (multiple businesses affecting the same landscape over time). They operate at multiple scales and through complex value chains.
The assessment identifies agriculture, forestry, fishing, energy, mining, construction, and transportation as sectors with particularly high quantified impacts. However, these primary sector impacts are driven by demand from downstream sectors—manufacturers, retailers, and consumers—making the entire value chain responsible.
Most critically, impacts often occur far from corporate headquarters and brand visibility. A technology company’s impact isn’t in its offices but in the rare earth mining that supplies its components. A retailer’s impact isn’t in its stores but in the agricultural and manufacturing operations producing what it sells.
This distance and complexity create both risk and opportunity. The risk is that impacts occur unknown to decision-makers until they create regulatory, reputational, or operational problems. The opportunity is that businesses with superior measurement and management capabilities can identify and address impacts before they become material risks.
A fundamental contribution of this assessment is demonstrating that measurement methods exist and are being used today. Businesses can act based on current knowledge.
The assessment categorizes methods into five groups:
Location-based observations use direct measurement at specific sites—field surveys, remote sensing, biodiversity monitoring programs. These provide high accuracy and can detect actual changes in biodiversity, but require significant resources and expertise. They’re appropriate for operational decisions where site-specific information is essential.
Participatory mapping and monitoring engage local communities, including Indigenous Peoples, in data collection and analysis. These approaches capture local knowledge, values that markets don’t reflect, and community priorities. They’re essential when business activities affect territories where Indigenous Peoples and local communities hold rights and knowledge.
Spatial analysis uses geographic information systems to overlay business activities with biodiversity data across landscapes or seascapes. These methods identify where operations or supply chains intersect with biodiversity priorities, enabling prioritization and risk screening. They’re appropriate for regional planning and identifying hotspots requiring detailed assessment.
Life cycle approaches trace impacts through product value chains from raw material extraction through manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal. These methods enable comparison between materials, suppliers, or product designs. They’re appropriate for procurement decisions, product development, and value chain management.
Macro-scale environmental economic models assess impacts across entire sectors or economies using input-output modeling and economic data. These provide broad coverage and enable comparison across businesses or portfolios. They’re appropriate for screening investments, setting corporate strategy, and understanding systemic risks.
No single method serves all purposes. Different business decisions require different approaches. The assessment provides detailed guidance on matching methods to decision contexts.
The assessment organizes business action into four decision-making levels:
Operations level decisions affect specific sites under direct business control—where to locate facilities, how to manage land, what practices to implement, how to monitor outcomes. These require site-specific information with high accuracy. Location-based observations and participatory approaches are most appropriate.
Value chain level decisions affect suppliers, distributors, and customers beyond direct control—which suppliers to work with, what standards to require, how to build capacity, how to trace materials. These require information across geographic regions and multiple actors. Spatial analysis and life cycle approaches are most appropriate.
Corporate level decisions affect entire companies—what targets to set, how to allocate resources, what policies to establish, which business models to pursue. These require information that covers all company activities and enables progress tracking. Life cycle approaches and macro-scale models can inform these decisions, though they may lack the precision needed to track specific actions.
Portfolio level decisions affect groups of investments or business units—which companies or projects to invest in, how to allocate capital, what risks to accept. These require comparable information across many entities. Macro-scale models and sector-level analysis are most appropriate for screening, though detailed assessment of specific investments requires more precise methods.
Understanding these levels clarifies what information different decision-makers need and which methods can provide it.
Despite available methods, business uptake remains limited. Less than 1% of publicly reporting companies mention biodiversity impacts in their reports, though this is growing rapidly in response to emerging regulations.
The assessment identifies barriers across five areas:
Policy and legal barriers include weak regulations, lack of mandatory disclosure, contradictory requirements across jurisdictions, insufficient enforcement, and harmful subsidies that reward biodiversity destruction. The numbers are stark: $7.3 trillion in global financial flows with direct negative impacts on nature versus $220 billion toward conservation and sustainable use. This 33-to-1 ratio of harm to help reflects policy failures, not inevitable market outcomes.
Economic and financial barriers include short-term profit pressures, fiduciary duty interpretations that prioritize immediate returns, limited financial resources particularly for small and medium enterprises, and failure to internalize biodiversity costs in prices.
Values and norms barriers include conflicting societal priorities, unclear consumer expectations, limited recognition of Indigenous rights, and organizational cultures that don’t prioritize environmental outcomes.
Technology and data barriers include poor data quality, inconsistent metrics, lack of transparency in value chains, and insufficient technology access in developing countries where impacts often occur.
Capacity and knowledge barriers include limited awareness among decision-makers, insufficient technical skills for implementation, scientific literature not written for business audiences, and gaps between what methods can measure and what businesses need to know.
These barriers don’t affect all businesses equally. Large multinational corporations have resources to invest in measurement and management. Small and medium enterprises—which collectively employ the majority of workers globally—face acute resource and capacity constraints. Businesses in developing countries face additional challenges including limited institutional frameworks, technology gaps, and fiscal constraints.
The assessment introduces a practical concept: the “enabling environment”—conditions where business actions that are profitable align with biodiversity outcomes.
This environment has five components:
Policy, legal, and regulatory frameworks set the rules. This includes mandatory regulations (environmental impact assessments, protected area restrictions, disclosure requirements), economic incentives (subsidies, taxes, payments for ecosystem services), and voluntary frameworks (industry standards, certification schemes). Effective policies reward conservation and penalize destruction, creating clear expectations and level playing fields.
Economic and financial systems determine what’s profitable. This includes subsidy reform (eliminating the $2.4 trillion in harmful subsidies), innovative finance (green bonds, sustainability-linked loans, biodiversity credits), risk management frameworks (nature-related financial disclosure), and capital allocation decisions by investors and lenders.
Social values, norms, and culture shape what’s acceptable. This includes consumer preferences, corporate culture, media coverage, educational curricula, and recognition of diverse values including Indigenous worldviews. Cultural change creates demand for responsible business behavior and makes harmful practices socially costly.
Technology and data enable measurement and transparency. This includes remote sensing, artificial intelligence for data analysis, blockchain for traceability, open data platforms, and technologies that reduce costs of monitoring. Technology makes formerly expensive assessments affordable and enables transparency that supports accountability.
Capacity and knowledge determine what’s possible. This includes scientific research, technical training, business education, knowledge exchange platforms, and integration of Indigenous and local knowledge. Capacity building enables businesses to understand their relationships with biodiversity and implement effective responses.
Creating this environment requires coordinated action by multiple actors—governments setting policies, financial institutions directing capital, businesses implementing practices, civil society demanding accountability, and Indigenous Peoples and local communities contributing knowledge and asserting rights.
No single actor can create the enabling environment alone. This is fundamentally a collective challenge requiring collaborative solutions.
Financial institutions and their regulators increasingly recognize biodiversity loss as material to financial stability.
Central banks in France, the Netherlands, Brazil, Malaysia, and other countries have conducted analyses of financial sector exposure to nature-related risks. The European Central Bank has assessed risks to the European banking system. These analyses consistently find material exposure through lending to and investment in sectors dependent on biodiversity.
The Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority published supervisory expectations requiring financial institutions to address nature-related financial risks. The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive mandates biodiversity disclosure. Similar requirements are emerging globally.
This regulatory attention reflects recognition that biodiversity loss creates three types of financial risk:
For businesses, this regulatory and financial sector attention means biodiversity risk management is becoming non-negotiable. Access to capital increasingly depends on credible measurement and management of nature-related risks.
For most businesses, the majority of biodiversity impacts and dependencies occur in supply chains, not in direct operations.
A technology manufacturer’s biodiversity footprint isn’t primarily in its offices and factories—it’s in the mining of rare earths, the production of components, and the disposal of products. A retailer’s footprint isn’t in its stores—it’s in the agricultural, manufacturing, and logistics operations producing and moving what it sells. A financial institution’s footprint isn’t in its offices—it’s in the businesses it finances.
This creates a measurement challenge. Most businesses don’t know the specific locations where their suppliers operate. Materials pass through multiple intermediaries. Products combine components from dozens or hundreds of sources. Agricultural commodities are pooled from many farms.
The assessment emphasizes that location-specific information is essential for accurate measurement. Generic sector-level data can screen for priorities, but managing impacts requires knowing where activities actually occur.
This information gap represents both risk and opportunity. The risk is that impacts occur unknown to decision-makers until they create problems. Companies face regulatory action, brand damage, or supply disruption from impacts they didn’t know existed.
The opportunity is that businesses investing in supply chain transparency gain strategic advantages. They identify and mitigate risks before competitors. They build resilient supply chains less vulnerable to disruption. They access capital from investors requiring supply chain disclosure.
Technologies increasingly enable traceability—satellite monitoring, blockchain systems, DNA testing, artificial intelligence for data analysis. The technical capability exists. What’s needed is business commitment to transparency and collaboration with suppliers.
The assessment emphasizes that Indigenous Peoples and local communities are knowledge holders and biodiversity stewards whose rights and knowledge must be respected.
The numbers are compelling. Indigenous territories contain approximately 80% of remaining global biodiversity despite representing a small fraction of global land area. This isn’t coincidental—Indigenous Peoples have maintained biodiversity through traditional management practices over generations.
Industrial development threatens approximately 60% of Indigenous lands globally. Demand for minerals essential to energy transition intensifies these pressures. Businesses often operate on or source from Indigenous territories without appropriate engagement.
The assessment emphasizes several principles:
For businesses, engaging appropriately with Indigenous Peoples and local communities isn’t only an ethical imperative—it’s a source of competitive advantage. Indigenous knowledge offers insights about ecosystem function, sustainable resource management, and long-term thinking that complement scientific approaches. Businesses that build genuine partnerships access this knowledge while those that don’t face increasing resistance and risk.
A significant finding is that methods to measure dependencies lag behind methods to measure impacts.
Impact assessment is relatively mature. Businesses subject to environmental regulations have conducted impact assessments for decades. Methods exist, guidance is available, and practitioners have experience. The assessment identifies gaps, but the foundation is solid.
Dependency assessment is less developed. Most businesses don’t systematically assess their dependencies on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. Methods exist in academic literature but aren’t translated into business tools. Available business tools focus on material dependencies (water, raw materials) and largely miss regulating contributions (climate regulation, water purification, pollination) and non-material contributions (recreation, cultural values).
This gap matters because dependencies create risks that aren’t captured by impact assessment alone. A business might have low direct impacts but high dependencies. Agricultural companies with good environmental practices still depend on pollination services they don’t control. Manufacturers with clean operations still depend on water supplies regulated by distant watersheds. Tourism operators with minimal impacts still depend on intact ecosystems that other actors might degrade.
Central bank analyses have attempted portfolio-level dependency assessment, using sector-average data to estimate exposure. These analyses raise awareness but have limitations. They don’t differentiate businesses within sectors based on geography or specific practices. They don’t assess ecosystem capacity to provide services. They don’t show how dependencies change over time.
The assessment calls for development of practical dependency assessment methods that businesses can implement. This requires translating ecosystem science into business-relevant metrics and creating tools that don’t require extensive technical expertise.
The assessment is specific about what constitutes effective business action.
The mitigation hierarchy—avoid, minimize, restore, offset—provides the framework. This hierarchy is well-established in environmental management but remains poorly implemented in business practice.
Avoidance means not creating impacts in the first place through site selection, design choices, and material substitution. This is most effective but requires incorporating biodiversity considerations into business decisions before commitments are made. Most businesses currently don’t assess biodiversity impacts until after major decisions are finalized.
Minimization means reducing unavoidable impacts through operational practices, technology choices, and management approaches. This requires ongoing attention and investment but is generally feasible for businesses committed to improvement.
Restoration means repairing ecosystems degraded by business activities. This is more costly and uncertain than avoidance or minimization. Restoration can deliver benefits but rarely returns ecosystems to baseline conditions, particularly for species-rich ecosystems or species with slow reproduction.
Offsetting means compensating for residual impacts by protecting or restoring ecosystems elsewhere. This is the least preferred option because it accepts biodiversity loss in one location while attempting to create gains elsewhere. The assessment notes that very few operations have achieved “no net loss” and questions remain about offset effectiveness.
The assessment emphasizes that later-stage measures are more costly, uncertain, and less effective than early-stage avoidance. Yet many businesses jump to restoration or offsets without fully exploring avoidance and minimization options.
Beyond the mitigation hierarchy, effective action requires:
Financial institutions have distinctive roles and responsibilities in this system.
Banks, asset managers, insurance companies, and other financial institutions don’t directly operate in ecosystems, but they finance the businesses that do. Their lending, investment, and insurance decisions determine what activities receive capital and what terms.
The assessment identifies two complementary approaches:
“Greening finance” means shifting capital away from activities that harm biodiversity and toward activities that conserve, restore, or sustainably use biodiversity. This includes:
“Financing green” means providing capital specifically for conservation, restoration, and sustainable management. This includes:
Financial institutions can also influence enabling environment development through policy advocacy, data and technology development, capacity building for clients, and collaboration on industry standards.
The assessment notes that financial institutions face barriers including limited availability of location-specific client data, lack of standardized metrics for comparison, insufficient scenarios for forward-looking risk assessment, and uncertainty about what constitutes adequate action.
However, regulatory pressure is intensifying. Central banks and supervisors increasingly expect financial institutions to assess and manage nature-related financial risks. Disclosure requirements are expanding. First movers gain advantages while laggards face regulatory and market pressure.
For businesses beginning this work, the assessment suggests practical entry points:
Screening identifies priorities requiring deeper attention. This can use existing tools and publicly available data to answer questions like: Which of our operations or suppliers are located in biodiversity hotspots? Which materials in our products have high biodiversity impacts? Which sectors in our investment portfolio have high dependencies?
Screening provides directional information sufficient for prioritization. It doesn’t require extensive resources or technical expertise. Multiple tools exist including IBAT (Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool), ENCORE (Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure), and others.
Materiality assessment determines which biodiversity relationships are most significant for your business. This considers magnitude of impacts and dependencies, likelihood of risks materializing, stakeholder expectations, and regulatory requirements. Materiality assessment helps allocate limited resources to highest-priority issues.
Baseline establishment documents current conditions before actions are taken. This is essential for later demonstrating that actions delivered results. Baselines require more detailed assessment at priority locations or for priority materials.
Target setting establishes specific, measurable objectives aligned with global goals and national frameworks. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework provides reference points. Science-based targets for nature are being developed through the Science Based Targets Network.
Action planning identifies specific interventions across operations, value chains, and corporate systems. Plans should be realistic about resources, capabilities, and timeframes while showing progression toward targets.
Implementation and monitoring put plans into practice with regular assessment of progress and outcomes. This requires commitment of resources and integration into business management systems.
Disclosure and verification make information available to stakeholders and enable independent confirmation of claims. This builds credibility and enables accountability.
The assessment emphasizes that businesses need not wait for perfect information or methods before acting. Available methods enable action now, with improvement over time as better data and methods develop.
The assessment identifies knowledge gaps that constrain business action:
Addressing these gaps requires coordinated investment by governments, research institutions, businesses, and civil society. Some gaps can be filled relatively quickly with existing technology and modest resources. Others require substantial research and development.
The assessment notes that businesses shouldn’t wait for all gaps to be filled before acting. Current knowledge enables substantial action. Better knowledge will enable better action over time.
The assessment describes what success looks like at system level:
Business incentives align with biodiversity outcomes so that profitable actions benefit nature. This requires fundamental changes to the conditions in which businesses operate—policies that reward conservation and penalize destruction, finance that flows toward sustainable activities, social values that demand environmental responsibility, technology that enables transparency, and capacity that enables implementation.
Business dependencies are understood and managed so that operations don’t exceed ecosystem capacity to provide nature’s contributions. This requires measuring dependencies, understanding ecosystem limits, managing demand within those limits, and investing in ecosystem health.
Business impacts are measured accurately and managed effectively so that negative impacts decrease while positive impacts increase. This requires methods appropriate to decision contexts, monitoring that verifies outcomes, and accountability systems that ensure claims are verifiable.
Financial flows align with biodiversity goals so that the $7.3 trillion currently flowing toward harmful activities shifts toward conservation, restoration, and sustainable use. This requires subsidy reform, innovative finance, risk-adjusted capital allocation, and long-term investment horizons.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities participate as knowledge holders and decision-makers with recognized rights. This requires free, prior and informed consent, access and benefit-sharing, co-creation of knowledge, and recognition of governance systems.
Collaboration replaces competition on biodiversity issues so that businesses work collectively on systemic challenges while competing on products and services. This requires pre-competitive collaboration, industry standards, shared data platforms, and collective advocacy for ambitious policy.
This vision requires transformation, not incremental improvement. Current conditions perpetuate business-as-usual despite increasing risk. Creating conditions for transformative change requires coordinated action by all actors.
This assessment delivers several unambiguous messages:
Every business depends on biodiversity. This isn’t debatable. Supply chains, operations, and business models rest on foundations of functioning ecosystems providing materials, regulating conditions, and supporting human wellbeing.
Every business impacts biodiversity. Direct or indirect, through operations or value chains, positive or negative—all business activities affect biodiversity in measurable ways.
These relationships create material risks. Physical risks from ecosystem degradation, transition risks from policy and market changes, and systemic risks from potential ecosystem collapse threaten business viability and financial stability.
Methods to measure these relationships exist today. The scientific community has developed, tested, and refined approaches for measuring business impacts and dependencies across contexts. Perfect methods don’t exist, but adequate methods do.
Businesses can act based on current knowledge. Waiting for perfect information is unnecessary and dangerous. Current knowledge enables substantial action with improvement over time.
First movers gain competitive advantages. Businesses that measure and manage biodiversity relationships reduce risks, capture opportunities, access capital, attract talent, and position for tightening regulations.
Collective action is necessary but insufficient. Individual business action alone won’t halt biodiversity loss. System-level change requires collaboration among governments, financial institutions, businesses, and civil society. But this doesn’t excuse individual businesses from acting within current conditions.
The operating environment is changing rapidly. Regulations are tightening. Investors are demanding disclosure. Consumers are increasingly aware. Technologies are enabling transparency. Scientific understanding is advancing. Businesses that prepare now will be better positioned for these changes.
For those responsible for business strategy, risk management, or sustainability, this assessment provides the scientific foundation for action. The question isn’t whether biodiversity matters to your business—it does. The question is whether you’ll measure and manage these relationships proactively or wait until external pressures force reactive response.
The businesses that thrive in coming decades will be those that recognize this reality and act accordingly.
IPBES is the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services—the biodiversity equivalent of the IPCC for climate change. It’s an independent intergovernmental body established by 94 governments to provide objective scientific assessments.
This Business and Biodiversity Assessment involved hundreds of scientists from around the world conducting peer-reviewed analysis of thousands of studies over several years. The findings were approved by member governments in February 2026 after rigorous review. It represents the current scientific consensus on business-biodiversity measurement methods.
Yes. Even businesses without direct natural resource extraction depend on biodiversity through their supply chains and the broader economic system.
Technology companies depend on rare earth minerals extracted from ecosystems, water for cooling data centers, and stable supply chains that rest on agricultural and resource sectors. Service companies depend on functioning infrastructure, reliable utilities, and workforce health—all ultimately dependent on ecosystem services.
Biodiversity loss creates three distinct types of financial risk that the assessment documents comprehensively:
Physical risks occur when ecosystem degradation directly affects operations. Manufacturing facilities face water shortages when watersheds degrade. Agricultural businesses lose productivity when pollinator populations decline. Coastal operations experience increased storm damage as natural barriers erode.
Transition risks emerge as policies and markets respond to biodiversity loss—new regulations, reformed subsidies, shifting consumer preferences, investor screening, and stranded asset risk.
Systemic risks threaten entire economic sectors when biodiversity loss reaches critical thresholds, creating stability risks that central banks already consider material.
The appropriate method depends on your decision context:
Most businesses will use multiple methods serving different purposes.
Yes, and the assessment explicitly acknowledges resource constraints for SMEs. Start with feasible screening, focus on the most material impacts/dependencies, and use industry schemes and shared tools to reduce burden.
Even modest steps build understanding that improves decisions over time.
Climate measurement often centers on a single metric system (CO₂e). Biodiversity is multi-dimensional (genes, species, ecosystems, and nature’s contributions), so it needs specific measurement and management beyond carbon accounting—even when climate and biodiversity actions overlap.
This is a central gap the assessment highlights. Start by mapping as far upstream as possible, prioritize high-risk materials, and work with key suppliers on transparency and traceability improvements over time.
Technology can help (satellite monitoring, blockchain traceability, DNA testing), but it takes commitment and collaboration.
Offsets are the last step in the mitigation hierarchy—after avoiding, minimizing, and restoring impacts. They carry real limits and require high-integrity standards (additionality, permanence, equivalence, independent verification).
Businesses should be skeptical of claims that offsets can compensate for any impact anywhere.
Core principles include FPIC (free, prior and informed consent), fair access and benefit-sharing, co-creation of monitoring methods, and recognition of rights and governance systems.
This is about long-term partnership with rights-holders and knowledge-holders—not one-off consultation.
The assessment highlights benefits including multi-category risk reduction, operational resilience, improved access to capital, market positioning, talent attraction, and innovation opportunities from sustainable models and nature-based solutions.
Yes. The assessment’s message is clear: adequate methods exist to act now, improving over time as data and methods advance. Waiting for perfection increases risk exposure.
Pre-competitive collaboration helps, but don’t wait for laggards. First movers can shape standards, capture market and capital advantages, and build capabilities before regulations tighten further.
Review what you already report, identify likely material impacts/dependencies, use free screening tools (e.g., IBAT, ENCORE), build leadership awareness, connect with peers, and draft a simple roadmap with quick wins and longer-term capability building.
The key is starting—each step improves the quality of the next.
The IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment was approved by member governments at the 12th Plenary Session in Manchester, United Kingdom, in February 2026. The assessment was conducted by international experts nominated by governments and underwent multiple rounds of peer review.
IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) is an independent intergovernmental body established to strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services. It’s the biodiversity equivalent of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
The full assessment report contains detailed methodological guidance, regional analyses, and extensive case studies. This article synthesizes key findings most relevant to business decision-makers.
Wayne Dunn, M.Sc. Management (Stanford GSB), is President and Founder of the CSR | ESG Training Institute and Managing Director of Baraka Impact Ltd., a fair-trade shea butter company sourcing directly from women’s cooperatives in Ghana. His pragmatic approach to sustainability is informed by over 25 years managing real-world business operations across supply chains, international trade, and community partnerships in Africa.
A Stanford Graduate School of Business alumnus (Sloan Fellow) and former Professor of Practice in Sustainability at McGill University, Wayne specializes in translating complex sustainability frameworks into actionable business strategies. His dual role as sustainability educator and operating business leader provides practical insight into the challenges businesses face implementing biodiversity and ESG commitments.
Wayne provides evidence-based training and advisory services helping businesses integrate biodiversity, climate, and social responsibility into operations and strategy. His approach emphasizes measurement methods that inform decisions, not just reporting requirements.
Connect with Wayne:
CSR | ESG Training Institute:
https://www.csrtraininginstitute.com
Baraka Impact:
https://www.barakaimpact.com
LinkedIn: [Editor to add Wayne’s LinkedIn URL]
Wayne Dunn is the founder of the CSR Training Institute and CSR | ESG Institute. A former Professor of Practice in sustainability at McGill University, he is recognized as a global thought leader and pragmatic problem solver, frequently speaking on business, social responsibility, economics, and strategy at events worldwide.
He is an award-winning global sustainability expert with extensive teaching, writing, lecturing and advisory service experience. He is supported by an extensive faculty and advisory team.
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