Nature is Everybody's Business. Unpacking the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment for Science, Policy, Practice and Finance 

Most of us get through an ordinary day without once thinking about biodiversity.

And yet, the coffee or tea we start our morning with, the food we set on the table before our children, the fuel that carries us to work, the medicines we need, the businesses we rely on for all these things and the economies that frame our countries, each draw on living systems working invisibly beneath the surface of our everyday lives. 

This rarely acknowledged web of dependence is what the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) set out to bring into focus through the Methodological Assessment of the Impact and Dependence of Business on Biodiversity and Nature’s Contributions to People (Business and Biodiversity Assessment). Released in February 2026 at the 12th session of the IPBES Plenary (IPBES 12) in Manchester, this assessment is the result of the work of 79 experts from 35 countries, created over three years and then negotiated and approved by more than 150 governments.

For the first time, it brings together a unified account of how business and nature shape one another, accompanied by over 100 concrete actions that help businesses, governments, financial actors and civil society understand, measure and act on their relationship with nature.

Every business depends on nature

Every business depends on biodiversity, whether directly or somewhere along its value chain, and every business leaves a mark on it in return. Even businesses that appear far removed from any forests, plains or rivers draw on nature constantly: for raw materials, for the regulation of essential conditions such as water supply or flood control and for the less tangible value of tourism, recreation or cultural identity.

At the same time, business has also been among the foremost drivers of nature's decline.

As ecosystems deteriorate, the consequences affect businesses, local economies and communities, frequently bringing about lasting economic, social and cultural costs. The expansion of the global economy has come at the price of profound biodiversity loss, and that loss now constitutes a systemic risk to economies, financial stability and human well-being. 

The responsibility is shared, and so is the work

As businesses must be at the core of any effort to reverse this trajectory, each of them must bear some measure of responsibility to act. An encouraging finding of the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment is that meaningful action can begin today. Companies can act across four levels of decision-making, from a single operational site to an entire investment portfolio, and many of the most effective measures also make for sound commercial decisions, such as reducing waste or using available resources more efficiently.   

Action that proves to be sustainable tends to follow two principles.

The first is genuine engagement with those affected, ensuring that stakeholders, including Indigenous Peoples and local communities, are meaningfully involved in decision-making, rather than being merely consulted or informed.

The second is transparency across the value chain, so that a business can trace where its materials originate and how they impact nature along the way. To keep this from sliding into greenwashing, the assessment calls for transparent, credible strategies and the open disclosure of impacts and dependencies.

Creating an enabling environment 

The assessment report uncovers an unsettling fact. Under the present conditions, it often seems more profitable to degrade nature than to conserve it. In 2023, finance flowing towards activities that harm nature reached an estimated 7.3 trillion dollars, while finance flowing towards conservation and restoration of nature reached approximately 220 billion.  Essentially, for every dollar funding activity with little or no benefit to nature, only about three cents go towards protecting or restoring it.

“Business as usual” is no accident, but rather what current incentives encourage and reward.

The good news is that change is still within reach. Governments and financial actors define the parameters within which businesses operate through policy, law and finance regulations, and this framework can be reshaped so that what benefits nature also benefits businesses financially.

The report refers to this as “an enabling environment” that can be constructed if every lever is pulled in the same direction: policy, finance, values and social norms, technology and our capacity and knowledge to act. None of this will happen through evidence alone, so we need to bring together the worlds of science, policy, practice and finance.

From global evidence to local practice

UNDP’s flagship Nature Pledge has been working to transform national policies that frame economic prosperity and environmental sustainability as a zero-sum trade-off. A global economy aligned with nature-positive outcomes could generate up to USD 10.1 trillion in annual business value and create 395 million jobs by 2030. These business opportunities could be unlocked by transforming the three economic systems responsible for risks to almost 80% of threatened and near-threatened species: food, land and ocean use; infrastructure and the built environment; and energy and extractives.

UNDP’s portfolio of biodiversity-finance solutions in 130 countries has already unlocked over USD 3.3 billion in nature finance, demonstrating that governments can start tapping into markets and jobs that leverage nature as a long-term asset class.

This work is woven into a wider effort that recognizes climate, biodiversity and land degradation as interlocking challenges, with nature placed at the heart of UNDP's development agenda. It brings partners, finance and policy together, working alongside governments and communities to respond to the current crisis of global nature loss.

Together, they cover both halves of the assessment's challenge: the evidence and dialogue on one side and the finance solutions that drive tangible outcomes on the other. Both initiatives work in service of the three shifts at the core of the UNDP Nature Pledge, in how nature is valued, how it is financed and how it shapes policy and practice.

What this work amounts to is best reflected in the impact it has on the places and communities it reaches.

Over the months ahead, BES-Net and BIOFIN will share a series of stories from across the globe, each one embodying one of the three shifts and grounding the key messages of the Business and Biodiversity Assessment in everyday practice.