IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment. Chapter 2: How does Business depend on biodiversity?

Businesses across sectors and scales are fundamentally dependent on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people, yet these dependencies remain unevenly understood, measured, and incorporated into decision-making. This paper synthesizes emerging methods and approaches used to identify, characterize, and assess business dependencies on biodiversity, drawing on the analytical framework developed for Chapter 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services assessment (IPBES) on business and biodiversity. We review a diverse set of existing qualitative and quantitative approaches, including natural capital accounting, ecosystem service assessments, supply-chain mapping, risk screening tools, and corporate disclosure frameworks, and compare their underlying assumptions, data requirements, and conceptual framings of nature–business relationships. We conducted a literature review of papers covering a wide variety of sectors including agriculture, fisheries, and forestry.

Building on this review, we develop a typology of business dependencies that accounts for differences across sectors, business sizes, and positions within value chains. The typology highlights dependencies on biodiversity and ecosystem functions, as well as interdependencies mediated through social, economic, and institutional contexts. Particular attention is given to how dependencies vary spatially and temporally, and how they intersect with other societal objectives such as climate mitigation, food security, and livelihoods, giving rise to synergies and trade-offs.

The analysis further examines methodological and practical challenges in characterizing dependencies, including data gaps, scale mismatches, uncertainties, and the risk of oversimplification in decision-support tools. The chapter examines challenges associated with characterizing dependencies, including data gaps, scale mismatches, and uncertainty in linking ecological change to business risk. Finally, we discuss the implications of different approaches for decision-making by businesses, financial institutions, governments, consumers, and civil society, emphasizing how improved understanding of biodiversity dependencies can inform risk management, strategic planning, and policy design. By clarifying commonalities and differences across existing approaches, this paper contributes to a more coherent and actionable foundation for integrating biodiversity considerations into business and financial decisions.