A global assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warns that a growth-driven business model that sidelines nature is unsustainable and could push both species and economies toward collapse if not changed.
The Business and Biodiversity Assessment Report, the first of its kind, was produced with input from more than 150 governments and experts from 35 countries. Coordinated by Ryo Kohsaka of the University of Tokyo, the assessment reframes the relationship between commerce and the natural world by documenting how companies both harm and rely on biodiversity and how ecosystems underpin human well-being.
The report gives clear examples of corporate dependence on nature: many crops depend on pollinators in decline, and fisheries are weakened as coral reefs and other marine habitats degrade from pollution and climate change. IPBES leaders stress that engaging with nature is not optional for firms but essential to their survival and long-term prosperity, and they call on businesses to play a stronger stewardship role.
Financing patterns currently reinforce biodiversity loss. In 2023 roughly $7.3 trillion (about €6.2 trillion) flowed to enterprises with direct negative impacts on nature, with about two-thirds of that money coming from private sources. Government subsidies were concentrated in fossil fuels and agriculture. Only about 3 percent of finance — roughly $220 billion — went to biodiversity conservation.
Those figures mirror United Nations analysis showing harmful investments far outstrip funding for protection by roughly 30 to 1. The IPBES authors describe such support for destructive activities as perverse incentives that maintain the status quo and undermine efforts to stop biodiversity decline.
Accountability for corporate impacts is weak, the assessment finds. Reporting on biodiversity is mostly voluntary, and fewer than 1 percent of publicly reporting companies mention their effects on biodiversity. The report notes a lack of meaningful rewards or penalties to change business behavior, and it points to short-term priorities — rising material consumption and a focus on quarterly earnings — as drivers that lock in damaging practices.
From a risk perspective, the current trajectory is already costly. The previous IPBES assessment in 2019 recorded that agricultural production value had risen by about 300 percent since 1970, yet by 2019 up to $577 billion in annual global crop output faced risk from pollinator declines and land degradation.
The new report also offers pathways for change and acknowledges that companies are not always intentionally destructive. It outlines tools and methods to help businesses quantify their impacts and dependencies, and it urges improved data and knowledge to inform decision-making.
To create an enabling environment for sustainability, IPBES recommends aligning five core business components: policy, legal and regulatory frameworks; economic and financial systems; social values, norms and culture; technology and data; and capacity and knowledge. The assessment lists more than 100 concrete actions across these areas and calls for collaboration among governments, consumers, businesses, NGOs, Indigenous peoples and local communities.
Such cooperation, the authors argue, can transform incentives, strengthen accountability, and scale investments in nature protection and restoration. Stephen Polasky, an ecological and environmental economist who co-chaired the assessment, emphasizes that better stewardship of biodiversity is central to managing risk across economies and societies — it is a pressing issue for boardrooms and government cabinets alike.
Edited by Tamsin Walker