Business Roles, Responsibilities, Options for Actions, and Evidence Gaps: Insights from Chapter 5 of the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment

The IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment (to be published in February 2026) represents a two-year effort of 80 experts representing diverse regions, sectors, and disciplines, to synthesise current knowledge on how businesses, including financial institutions, impact and depend on biodiversity and how these relationships can be measured in consistent, transparent, and scientifically grounded ways. It also identifies a broad range of options for businesses of all sizes, sectors, regions, and activities, as well as other actors across society, to act in support of transformative change and contribute to global frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. In this session, we will discuss key findings from Chapter 5, which focuses specifically on businesses’ roles and responsibilities, their motivations and barriers to action, and the options for action available to them to directly support the achievement of global biodiversity goals. The chapter provides an overview of how companies understand their biodiversity impacts and dependencies, the internal and external incentives that shape their decisions, and the practical steps they can take to contribute to limiting the extent of their impacts and dependencies, while also supporting nature recovery. The report, and this chapter, also outline a long list of gaps in theory, methods and evidence that currently hinder robust, evidence-informed business action on biodiversity. We will present and discuss these gaps, including perspectives from business, indigenous and local communities, and other audiences on which gaps matter most for improving practice, and how partnerships, pilots, and targeted research could help advance this work and strengthen real-world implementation. We will seek to gather additional input from participants at this session. Our goal is to ensure that the scientific community addresses the most relevant research questions and provides knowledge that directly informs and enables action on biodiversity sooner rather than later.