Unlocking Biodiversity Information for Nature Finance: Challenges, Opportunities, and Pathways Forward

Promoting sustainable business practices has become increasingly difficult in a world shaped by overlapping global crises. Companies are under pressure to demonstrate clear economic value from any investment, including those aimed at understanding their impacts on biodiversity and the ecosystem services that support their operations. Yet these natural assets—fundamental to long-term business resilience—remain largely invisible in conventional market valuations. A major barrier to improving natural capital accounting and place-based assessments is the widespread perception that high-quality biodiversity data are prohibitively expensive to obtain.

In reality, biodiversity is monitored daily across the globe through site surveys, environmental impact assessments, compliance with environmental regulations, and routine ecological studies - activities often funded by businesses themselves. Despite their value, most of these datasets remain private or inaccessible, leaving significant gaps in the global biodiversity information landscape. This fragmented and incomplete picture of nature has two major implications. First, society misses critical opportunities to monitor biodiversity change, evaluate progress toward the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), and develop more effective conservation strategies. Second, businesses lose access to richer, in situ datasets that could dramatically strengthen verification, benchmarking, and the development of defensible counterfactuals in sustainability reporting and nature-related disclosures.

Here, we explore the persistent disconnect between the biodiversity data that exist and the data needed to support credible nature finance, high-integrity corporate assessments, and evidence-based policy implementation. We highlight the structural, technical, and cultural barriers that limit data sharing, from confidentiality concerns to inconsistent standards and the absence of clear value propositions for contributors. We then examine emerging solutions, including data-sharing partnerships, incentives for open biodiversity information, and innovations in governance and digital infrastructure, that can unlock privately held datasets while safeguarding sensitive information.

By clarifying the steps needed to move from aspiration to action, we show how we can accelerate the availability, quality, and usability of biodiversity data, enabling both society and business to make more informed, accountable, and nature-positive decisions.