Leadership for biodiversity

This presentation offers a leadership perspective on addressing the global decline of biodiversity, considering the role of consumers, business, and governance therein.

International reports (e.g. IPBES TCA, 2024) recommend transformative change in global societal and economic systems to address biodiversity decline. While leadership is a known enabler of planned and transformational change, its specific role in the transformative change required to halt biodiversity loss remains underexplored. The problem appears two-sided. Conservation research focuses less on actors, or their leadership, while leadership research does not address biodiversity, instead contributing to biodiversity decline via a focus on companies’ profit maximization.

In this theoretical paper and presentation, we develop the concept of biodiversity-respectful leadership. In our conceptual development, we build on an interdisciplinary perspective connecting the natural and social sciences and an interdisciplinary research consortium’s multi-year discovery and insights, cf. BIODIFUL.

Traditionally leadership was considered the characteristic of charismatic individuals or managers in power positions. Recent advances posit leadership as an attribute that anyone can develop. Moreover, leadership can be shared by individuals, organizations and/or countries, while relationally connecting with nature. Notwithstanding, addressing wicked problems benefits from multi-level perspectives. Notwithstanding, the developed multi-level biodiversity-respectful leadership framework operates at individual, organizational, and institutional levels of analysis. In doing so, it examines how biodiversity loss can be addressed through the leadership of consumers, businesses, and public governance.

Our main contribution is in outlining the need for and the contents of a potential new leadership approach that addresses the biodiversity crisis, termed ‘biodiversity-respectful leadership’. In the paper, we develop such a multi-level leadership framework alongside propositions, while recognizing the many challenges in such leadership development.

Going forward, our findings are a call for action. All players, from the UN, to governments, firms, NGOs, local players, and individual consumer citizens, across the globe need to step up, awaken to, develop, and enact biodiversity-respectful leadership. This means taking responsibility for one’s actions and recognizing the extent of one’s impact on others and the planet. There is no escaping the responsibility for our planet’s wellbeing, be it one’s private or professional life. This is the personal and collective growth opportunity of our times.