Biodiversity Sustainability Disclosure Standards Need a Matching Scientific Base of Evidence

Under the “Omnibus” initiative, the European Commission is currently revising its European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), including disclosure requirement E4, Biodiversity and Ecosystems. Simultaneously, global standard setters such as the International Sustainability Standard Board (ISSB) are in the process of developing biodiversity reporting standards to serve as a global baseline. While normative disclosure frameworks define “what” companies must report, they do not provide the “how” in the form of tools, workflows, or methodologies needed to translate firm-level activities into measures of impact, risk, and opportunity across environmental, social, and governance dimensions. Researchers have yet to build a bridge between reporting indicators and the transmission mechanisms that determine the physical and financial materiality of biodiversity for corporations. By launching the Competence and Transfer Center (CTC) for Sustainable Finance and Regulation in 2024, the House of Finance took a step toward closing this gap.

The CTC serves as a platform for transdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration among experts from economics, law, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, with the aim of supporting global standard setters in advancing sustainability reporting. Funded by the State of Hesse and established through a Memorandum of Understanding with the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), the CTC works in partnership with institutions including Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, the Institute for Social-Ecological Research (ISOE), the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UfZ), the Faculty of Biological Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, and the Deutsche Rechnungslegungs Standards Committee e.V. (DRSC).

We will present insights developed through a series of workshops organized by the CTC in 2024 and 2025, which brought together participants from NGOs, the finance sector, ISSB board members, and EU policymakers. These findings, synthesized in a dedicated publication, highlight examples of underexplored transmission channels, propose concrete actions to strengthen research practices, and call on researchers to engage in a coordinated effort built on interoperable datasets, robust empirical identification strategies, and multi-method approaches. Without such transdisciplinary cooperation, reporting standards risk becoming a mere bureaucratic exercise, disconnected from ecological, economic, and social realities, and thus having little real impact on sustainability.