The new IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment is being read as a wake-up call for business and finance. It is. But it is also a quieter call for stronger organisational capability, coordination and ongoing adaptation. This post reflects on what the assessment implies for how we design, govern and evaluate sustainability work in complex settings, and suggests ways it could serve as a conversation starter with colleagues in strategy, risk, procurement or evaluation.
In an earlier post reflecting on the IPBES Nexus and Transformative Change assessments, I explored how fragmented governance, economic incentives and power structures limit our ability to respond systemically. The Business and Biodiversity Assessment extends that systemic framing into corporate strategy, finance and organisational governance. The new IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment lands with a simple but uncomfortable message: biodiversity is not a side issue for the environment team. It underpins the economy itself.
Pollinators support crop production. Wetlands regulate water. Forests stabilise climate and soils. Coral reefs sustain fisheries and coastal protection. Much of what we call economic value rests on ecological processes that rarely appear in balance sheets or board papers.
The assessment is explicit that all businesses depend on and impact biodiversity, directly or indirectly, often through long value chains and financial portfolios. At the same time, current economic and governance conditions frequently reward short-term financial returns and volume growth over longer-term ecological sustainability. This is not framed only as an environmental concern. It is described as a systemic risk to the economy, financial stability and human wellbeing, with implications for revenues and for human rights.
The numbers behind the warning
The assessment points to the scale of misalignment between economic flows and ecological foundations.
In 2023, global public and private finance flows with direct negative impacts on nature were estimated at around $7.3 trillion, while only around $220 billion flowed toward activities supporting conservation and sustainable use. These figures are less about shock value and more about structure. They show where incentives currently sit.
IPBES also frames biodiversity decline as a systemic risk to economies and financial stability. Risks do not remain neatly within sectors. They ripple through supply chains, regions and time horizons, and physical, transition and systemic risks can reinforce each other.
It is not surprising that boards and regulators are beginning to pay attention. But the implications extend well beyond disclosure frameworks and voluntary corporate action.
From business risk to systems thinking
One of the most useful aspects of the assessment is how it is organised. Impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities are presented across four interconnected levels: operations, value chains, corporate governance and portfolios. That structure already implies a systems lens, even if the word ‘systems’ is not always used explicitly.
A supermarket may have limited direct ecological footprint, yet it sits within agricultural supply chains dependent on soil health and water regulation. A bank may not clear forests, yet its lending portfolio may finance activities that do.
Impacts are often indirect. Dependencies are frequently hidden. Effects accumulate. They interact with climate change, pollution and land use decisions. Some cross ecological thresholds that are difficult to reverse.
Responding to biodiversity loss, therefore, is not simply a technical exercise in better metrics. It requires organisations to become more comfortable working across scales and boundaries, and more willing to question how different parts of the system connect, using both top-down and bottom-up methods where appropriate to the decision level. This is where systems literacy and collaborative practice move from being useful to being essential.
Five practical shifts for organisations
The assessment does more than diagnose risk. It points toward a set of practical shifts in how organisations understand their impacts, govern decisions and relate to the systems they depend on. Five broad shifts stand out.
Make dependencies and impacts visible
All businesses have impacts and dependencies, even when these sit upstream or downstream. Methods exist to analyse these, but they are patchy, still developing, and often not yet written with business users in mind.
In practice, this can involve bringing people from procurement, operations, finance and sustainability into the same room to map biodiversity dependencies across the organisation. A retailer, for example, might map its reliance on pollination, water availability and soil health across its fresh produce lines and discover that a small number of regions represent a large share of its nature-related risk. It may also mean revisiting theories of change or risk registers and asking where ecological assumptions sit, and whether they are explicit.
Disclosure, in this light, becomes part of a learning process rather than an end in itself.
Bring nature into governance and decision-making
IPBES describes physical, transition and systemic risks associated with biodiversity loss. These are not abstract risks. They affect asset values, supply stability and social licence.
In practice, this may mean adjusting board reporting templates, revising investment criteria to consider long-term ecological risk, or linking executive performance to nature-related outcomes alongside climate metrics. A regional bank, for instance, might begin to stress-test its loan book against drought and flood scenarios affecting sectors that depend heavily on healthy ecosystems.
It is less about adding another indicator and more about reshaping how decisions are framed and which assumptions about nature are surfaced.
Work differently across value chains and places
The assessment highlights actions at operations, value chain, corporate and portfolio levels. At the operations level, it emphasises the use of the mitigation hierarchy (avoid, minimise, restore, offset). It also underlines that, for many sectors, major impacts and dependencies extend through value chains rather than being confined to the firm’s own operations.
For many organisations, this extends beyond internal operations. It may require convening producers, suppliers, communities and regulators to work at landscape or catchment scale. For example, a group of agribusinesses and local authorities might establish a catchment-level forum focused on water quality targets and land-use change, agreeing shared thresholds, restoration priorities and monitoring approaches.
These are governance challenges as much as technical ones. If you are working in programme design or monitoring and evaluation, this might mean paying as much attention to how multi-actor platforms are set up and stewarded as to the specific on-the-ground interventions they agree.
Engage with enabling conditions
Voluntary business action is important, but on its own it is unlikely to shift outcomes at scale. Policy settings, financial incentives, social norms and knowledge systems shape what is rewarded and what is discouraged.
IPBES frames this as an enabling environment challenge: unless policy, legal and regulatory frameworks, economic and financial systems, social values and norms, technology and data, and capacity and knowledge evolve together, what is profitable for businesses will often remain misaligned with what is good for biodiversity and society.
Organisations therefore face questions about how they participate in policy processes, how their trade associations advocate, and whether their lobbying positions align with biodiversity goals. In that sense, this moves biodiversity from an internal management issue to a broader institutional conversation.
Strengthen measurement and integrate knowledge into decision-making
Methods, metrics and data exist, but they are uneven, evolving, and not always easily comparable across sectors or regions. The assessment places strong emphasis on improving measurement of impacts and dependencies, strengthening business-relevant data, and integrating scientific and Indigenous and local knowledge into decision-making processes.
In practice, this may involve piloting new metrics, improving the comparability of estimates, and ensuring that information on impacts and dependencies is embedded in governance and procurement processes rather than sitting in standalone sustainability reports. It can also mean partnering with Indigenous Peoples and local communities to co-design measurement and monitoring approaches, ensuring free, prior and informed consent, in accordance with national legislation, and respectful treatment of different knowledge systems.
The shift here is from isolated reporting towards measurement that meaningfully informs decisions.
What this means for practice
Taken together, the assessment, for me, reads less like a technical manual and more like a capability agenda. It points toward organisations seeing themselves as part of coupled social–ecological systems, recognising cross-scale risks, and collaborating across sectors and knowledge traditions. Drawing on these messages, I see at least four practical capability areas for those designing, governing and evaluating sustainability initiatives.
Systems thinking and systemic design
This capability involves seeing how operations, finance, policy and place interact, mapping feedbacks and unintended consequences, and designing interventions that work across scales rather than at a single site (see the systems thinking hub on Learning for Sustainability for tools on mapping interconnections).
It includes working with multiple forms of evidence and being able to move between portfolio, corporate, value chain and site-level perspectives, as reflected in the assessment’s structure.
Multi-actor collaboration and partnership practice
This capability involves convening suppliers, regulators, communities and finance actors; working across organisational boundaries; and building shared ownership of outcomes in specific territories (see the collaboration and partnerships hub for frameworks and facilitation resources).
The assessment underscores that creating an enabling environment requires coordinated action among governments, financial actors, businesses, civil society, and Indigenous Peoples and local communities, not just isolated projects.
Adaptive management and learning-oriented monitoring and evaluation
This capability involves treating biodiversity strategies as working hypotheses, using monitoring to inform course correction, and embedding feedback loops into governance processes (see the adaptive management and climate adaptation hub for practical guidance and examples).
IPBES notes that tying specific business actions to biodiversity outcomes can be difficult, and that existing methods and data remain incomplete and uneven across sectors and regions. For organisations, this suggests that iterative, learning-oriented approaches are likely to be more realistic than one-off planning cycles.
Respectful engagement with Indigenous Peoples and local communities
This capability involves working with free, prior and informed consent; interweaving knowledge systems; and recognising the cultural and relational dimensions of biodiversity alongside economic ones (see the systemic co-design page for approaches and tools).
The assessment highlights the importance of Indigenous and local knowledge in understanding and monitoring biodiversity, and notes that industrial development and harmful subsidies can disproportionately affect Indigenous territories and livelihoods.
These capabilities are not optional extras. If the IPBES assessment is taken seriously, they become part of the work. Each of these areas is explored in more detail through the linked resource hubs on the Learning for Sustainability site, where I have curated tools, frameworks and reflections drawn from practice in complex, multi-actor settings.
Concluding reflections
Global assessments can sometimes feel distant from day-to-day practice. The value of this one, for me, is that it makes explicit the connections between ecological foundations, economic systems and organisational choices.
The message is not simply that businesses should report more. It is that responding to biodiversity loss requires different ways of seeing, deciding and working together.
Strengthening those capabilities is slow, relational work. Yet it is often where the real leverage lies, especially if we want conditions to shift so that what is profitable for businesses aligns more often with what is good for biodiversity and society.
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