Business impact on biodiversity

Understanding how businesses generate, amplify, or mitigate pressures and impacts on biodiversity is essential for enabling transformative change toward the 2050 Vision of “Living in Harmony with Nature.” Drawing on insights from Chapter 3 of the upcoming IPBES Business & Biodiversity Assessment, this contribution synthesises the main aspects, impact types, and pathways through which business activities affect biodiversity directly or indirectly across sectors and value chains. It outlines how different forms of economic activity shape ecological outcomes and why a clear grasp of these relationships is central to designing effective interventions. The session highlights the distinctions between direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss and shows how businesses—depending on their sector, operational model, and geographic footprint—can exert pressures on biodiversity at multiple scales.

A key takeaway is the recognition that business impacts are rarely isolated. Instead, they are embedded in complex, interdependent networks of supply-chain relationships and cross-sectoral linkages. These impacts vary widely, ranging from highly visible direct pressures to diffuse indirect effects that accumulate over time. They also interact with differing production profiles—from small and informal economic activities to large-scale formal operations—shaping biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people in both positive and negative ways.

Insights from the assessment also make clear that major challenges persist. Significant data and methodological gaps continue to limit the field, resulting in inconsistent and fragmented impact metrics that hinder a full understanding of who, what, and where biodiversity is affected. Nonetheless, there is strong consistency in identifying that primary sectors, particularly extractive industries, remain those that most substantially affect biodiversity, with their impacts reverberating across upstream and downstream supply chains globally.

Overall, this chapter underscores the need for cross-sectoral, science-based approaches that can identify leverage points capable of meaningfully reducing biodiversity pressures. Such approaches provide a critical foundation for coordinated, whole-of-society efforts to bend the curve of biodiversity loss.