This workshop therefore
- explores the channels through which corporate dependencies and impacts on nature transmit from the real economy side (e.g., production) into financial markets through company valuations and asset prices.
- identifies key challenges and solutions for improving the availability of biodiversity data for business sustainability more broadly.
The workshop will bring together researchers from financial economics, sustainability science, business management, and conservation biology to identify challenges, opportunities and lessons learned from current research and business initiatives.
Participants will present theoretical models and empirical evidence that map the pathways from nature degradation to economic outcomes, focusing on two primary channels: the disruption of ecosystem services vital for production, and the transition risks arising from new environmental regulations, disclosure requirements (e.g., Corporate Sustainability Requirement Directive in Europe, Sustainability Disclosure Standards in the UK), and rising legal challenges on the destruction of nature.
They will also present case studies on the latest biodiversity metrics research and practical examples of biodiversity needs and uses relating to biodiversity credits, renewable energy, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining, marine services, and sport.
We will address key questions such as:
- What biodiversity data do businesses need for assessing their impacts and dependencies and monitoring success of nature-positive initiatives?
- How do markets value a company’s reliance on specific ecosystem services like pollination or water filtration? Are there examples of financial losses due to companies’ dependence on degraded ecosystems and that can be observed at the scale of global financial markets?
- Are firms with significant negative impacts on biodiversity facing a higher cost of capital?
This workshop aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on creating robust, actionable frameworks for corporates, investors, and policymakers.
Co-conveners: Fanny Cartellier, Kerrigan Unter, Elsa Almeida
In line with the expectations of investors, regulators, standard setters and policy-makers, and in response to the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) recommendations, corporates and financial institutions are beginning to understand how nature-related risks and opportunities emerge from their dependencies and impacts on nature. This calls for an integrated approach to identify, assess and manage material nature- related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities. Despite growing recognition, nature-related risks remain underrepresented in corporate reporting, and their financial implications are poorly quantified. We investigate how nature-related risks can lead to material financial effects on corporates and financial institutions. Although clear linkages exist, nature-related issues are frequently not considered financially material in corporate reports, especially from a single materiality perspective. Additionally, despite being a critical pathway to potential risk affecting the financial prospects of a business, dependencies on nature remain poorly understood and typically underexplored. Many companies continue to struggle to implement robust risk assessment methods, particularly with assessing the financial implications of these risks. We demonstrate how nature-related risks may affect an entity’s cash flows, cost of capital and access to capital over different time horizons, and thus influence investor decisions and capital allocation. We synthesize evidence from a database of over 600 entries across 360 sources, complemented by corporate interviews and stakeholder consultations. The evidence of financial effects of nature-related risks for businesses and the economy is extensive. The evidence spans sectors, scales, hazards, time horizons and types of effect, with high-quality analysis across evidence types. In particular, through water scarcity, liability risk, reputational risk and policy risk. However, full causal chains (from dependencies and impacts to financial effects) are rarely fully mapped, with transmission channels remaining underexplored. Interviews and disclosure reports reveal evidence to demonstrate that information on nature-related risks is important to investors and that omitting, misstating or obscuring such information could reasonably be expected to influence investors’ decisions.
How to cite: Alvarez, J., Postel-Vinay, N., Melis, A., McKenzie, E., and Ranger, N.: Evidence Review on the Financial Effects of Nature-Related Risks, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-59, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-59, 2026.
As proposed by among others Giglio et al. (2025, RoF), we therefore focus on earnings conference call (ECC)–based indicators as a potentially more accurate source of information on biodiversity risk exposure. We use an expert-labelled sample of ECC excerpts combined with ChatGPT-assisted annotation and fine-tune BERT models to examine whether this disclosure and the associated measure of biodiversity risk exposure are financially material. We assemble a global panel of ECC transcripts for listed firms from 2001–2024 and split each call into short excerpts, structured around the prepared remarks, analyst Q&A exchanges, and closing statements. Environmental and biodiversity specialists manually label a high-quality sample of excerpts into several categories (biodiversity, climate risk and opportunity, and natural disasters), explicitly flagging cases where dictionary methods misclassify language (e.g. “technology ecosystem”) as biodiversity-related. We then use this labelled set with ChatGPT-assisted annotation and fine-tune transformer models (BERT) to estimate the independent probabilities of belonging to each category. Aggregating these probabilities yields firm-year, LLM-based indicators of nature-related disclosure. In parallel, we construct a keyword-based baseline for biodiversity and climate from ECCs. We use this indicator, which is similar to those used elsewhere in the literature, for the main empirical tests and to benchmark the LLM measures.
Using the keyword indicators, we document a strong upward trend in biodiversity disclosure in ECCs from 2001 to 2024, starting from very low levels and with a sharp jump around 2020–2021. Comparing with climate change, we find that climate disclosure starts from a much higher and more stable baseline and also rises around the Covid period, so that biodiversity remains at lower absolute levels but grows more rapidly over time. Also, linking biodiversity disclosure to firm characteristics and market outcomes, we find that higher biodiversity exposure is positively associated with social ESG scores and negatively associated with stakeholder-engagement scores, while largely unrelated to current profitability. Firms that mention biodiversity exhibit slightly lower subsequent excess returns and higher market beta, suggesting that markets currently interpret biodiversity primarily as a source of systematic risk rather than a short-term opportunity.
How to cite: Groom, B.: Pricing Biodiversity Risk: Evidence from Earnings Conference Calls, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-966, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-966, 2026.
As environmental risks escalate in complexity and urgency—particularly biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation—they represent systemic threats with profound implications for financial stability, corporate resilience, and long-term economic performance. The European Central Bank underscores this concern, noting that 72% of euro area firms are highly dependent on ecosystem services and face severe disruption if these services deteriorate. These risks are amplified by the declining reliability of ecosystem functions and the growing unpredictability of ecological dynamics. Despite clear evidence of vulnerability, nature-related impacts remain poorly reflected in current corporate sustainability disclosures, constraining the ability of investors, regulators, and other stakeholders to evaluate exposure and respond effectively.
This paper addresses the urgent need for relevant, accurate, and decision-useful information by conducting a cross-disciplinary conceptual analysis that integrates insights from accounting, reporting, and biodiversity science. The central challenge lies in translating complex ecological realities into scientifically credible and practically applicable metrics within corporate reporting frameworks. We respond to this challenge by drawing an analytical parallel between fair value accounting (FVA) principles and biodiversity impact estimation, using IFRS 13’s hierarchical data levels as an entry point for comparison.
Our analysis demonstrates that fundamental trade-offs between relevance, reliability, and verifiability—well known in financial reporting—also characterize biodiversity disclosures. Similar to Level 3 FVA, biodiversity metrics that rely on generalized inputs, such as revenue-based footprinting, introduce significant uncertainty and risk of misinterpretation. These approaches compress intricate, location-specific biological realities into abstract indicators, undermining decision-making and potentially leading to ill-informed strategies.
To advance a more robust approach, we propose a conceptual framework that prioritizes Level 2 data—scientifically established environmental pressures such as land use, pollution, and resource exploitation identified by IPBES as direct drivers of biodiversity loss. Pressure-based disclosures, collected through transparent and replicable methods, offer stable, reliable inputs for science-based models. By focusing on these scientifically anchored measures, biodiversity reporting can evolve toward a practical, decision-useful model. This approach enables companies and investors to generate more precise risk assessments, strengthen the foundation for meaningful data generation, and support actionable strategies to mitigate systemic environmental risks.
How to cite: Crona, B. and Kashyap, S.: Not as different as we think: Bridging accounting and environmental science for enhanced biodiversity reporting quality, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-195, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-195, 2026.
There are increasing internal and external pressures on the business sector to enhance sustainability, and move towards nature-positive outcomes that contribute to global goals, such as Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF). However, many companies are still unable to unpack what biodiversity means for them and, as a result, find the subject daunting. Crucially, they do not know how or where to obtain the data they need for environmental planning, monitoring, reporting and disclosure.
The challenges facing businesses in accessing and using biodiversity data are numerous. Biodiversity cannot be measured by a single metric like carbon, yet the landscape of business-specific indicators is crowded, competitive and confused; none cover all business applications in all biomes and many rely on old secondary data or solitary blunt metrics. Indicators proposed for business are often different and disconnected from those used by governments, NGOs and conservation experts. As a result, our recent research shows that businesses are significantly more likely than other data users to be unclear on what biodiversity indicators to use. The proliferation of business-specific guidelines, tools, and databases risks adding to the confusion.
We argue here that lessons learned from decades of conservation science and practice can provide solutions for business and are already influencing the development of relevant approaches, tools and practices. Case studies used to illustrate progress and solutions focus on practical examples in the renewable energy sector, agriculture, and sports organizations.
Common solutions that emerge in adapting conservation approaches to business include following best practices in monitoring by using a pressure-state-response-benefit framework of scalable, linked indicators, including those linked to the KMGBF. Relevant global or regional databases and platforms can provide some key data, but this needs to be complemented by primary data collected with methods chosen based on the indicators used, feasibility, budget and capacity. Businesses do not need to tackle biodiversity alone. It is notable that many of the companies making the most progress have well-established partnerships with conservation organizations or consultancies with the requisite knowledge, experience and tools to help.
How to cite: Stephenson, P.: Unblocking the flow of biodiversity data for business and finance: issues, challenges and opportunities , World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-206, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-206, 2026.
The accelerating loss of biodiversity presents urgent challenges for both conservation and business, prompting the emergence of Voluntary Biodiversity Credits (VBCs) as innovative market-based instruments to mobilize private sector finance for nature-positive outcomes. Our contribution to this growing field of inquiry comes from examining VBCs from the perspective of business.
We start with the commensurability dilemma: unlike carbon credits, biodiversity credits cannot be reduced to a single fungible unit sought after by business. This is due to the multidimensional and context-dependent nature of biodiversity, and we demonstrate that pluralistic, multi-metric approaches are essential for ecological integrity and market credibility, and even offer improvements over carbon-centered models for business.
To support business engagement, we developed a practical guide outlining the rationale for VBCs, distinctions between voluntary and mandatory schemes, and the operationalization of outcome-based credits. The guide aims to stimulate demand for high integrity VBCs by aligning them with corporate priorities, emphasizing integration within robust biodiversity strategies, adherence to the mitigation hierarchy, and transparent reporting in line with emerging global standards. Criteria for high-quality credits are detailed from a business perspective.
In coordination with the Biodiversity Credit Alliance, we also produced a document addressing key issues in metrics and measurement for VBCs, structured as Frequently Asked Questions. This resource covers technical and governance challenges in measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV), and explains how advances in remote sensing, eDNA, and AI-enabled monitoring are expanding the scope of biodiversity assessment, while highlighting the limitations of these technologies. High-integrity VBCs require blended approaches, combining traditional field surveys with technological innovation, underpinned by harmonized data protocols and transparent registries.
Collectively, these outputs underscore the need to move beyond carbon-centric models, advocate for pluralistic and context-sensitive approaches to biodiversity measurement, and highlight the importance of integrity, transparency, and equity in market design. Together, they chart a pathway for credible, scalable, and equitable VBC markets, offering actionable insights for practitioners, policymakers, and investors.
How to cite: Dellecker, A.: Examining Voluntary Biodiversity Credits from a Business Perspective, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-205, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-205, 2026.
Business management research has struggled to comprehend and measure the business-biodiversity relationship, usually oversimplifying indicators or failing to evaluate biodiversity in any meaningful capacity. This is clearly reflected in business reporting and disclosure on biodiversity-related topics, where firms either tend to not report on biodiversity at all or mention biodiversity without reporting any quantitative indicators. Conservation science presents a cluttered and complex landscape of biodiversity indicators and tools that are difficult for businesses to navigate. However, by integrating insights from business and conservation, it is possible to meaningfully measure business-biodiversity relationships.
Drawing on a mixed methods case study of a California winery, I examine the relationships that businesses can have with biodiversity. This winery was selected because it is a business at the intersection of both an industry and a location that is ideal for exploring the complexity of business-biodiversity relationships. California is a global biodiversity hotspot; that is, it is one of twenty-five locations in the world home to a high proportion of endemic species and identified as a priority for conservation efforts. The California wine industry impacts biodiversity through activities such as pesticide use, land usage, and monocultures; depends on biodiversity such as ecosystem services, pollinator species, and grapevine varietal variation; and is impacted by biodiversity such as pests and invasive species.
I evaluate the impacts, dependencies and risks across the ecosystem, species, and genetics levels. This case draws on spatial biodiversity data and qualitative information from the winery website to display a practical approach to evaluating business-biodiversity relationships. I map both the location of the winery and the biodiversity data with geographic information systems. Importantly, I also highlight the range of strategies that businesses can adopt to manage their relationships with biodiversity. Most strategies adopted by wineries tend to degrade natural ecosystems, but I highlight nature-based solutions as a pathway for business strategy.
How to cite: Unter, K.: Business and Biodiversity: A California Winery Deep Dive, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-207, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-207, 2026.
This paper examines how biodiversity has been translated from an ecological concern into an organisational risk. Building on Hardy & Maguire's (2020) concept of risk translation, I develop a processual account of how biodiversity has become progressively shaped to fit categories of operational, reputational, credit, and legal risks.
While social and environmental accounting scholarship has examined biodiversity disclosure practices, it predominantly assumes accountability demands as given, focusing on improving reporting mechanisms. This approach leaves unexamined the institutional and material conditions through which biodiversity became a legitimate item to "account for" in organisations. Within a four-decades-long tradition of risk studies across sociology, management and organisation theory, this paper draws from works that conceptualise risk as a socio-political achievement. Risks are socially constructed objects emerging through discursive practices, material artefacts, and institutional arrangements, while risk translation processes make unfamiliar phenomena legible by reframing them within familiar risk categories.
Drawing on document-based discourse analysis of reports, guidelines, and policy documents produced in the UK and EU between 1992 and 2023, the study identifies two distinct translation phases. The first phase (1992–2004) traces three enabling conditions that made biodiversity visible as a novel risk: impact and dependency framing (establishing causal links between business operations and ecological harm), ecosystem services thinking (estimating nature's contributions in economic terms), and eco-informatics (advancements in ecological data computation and display). The second phase (2004–2023) examines how diverse actors translated the novel risk into their institutional categories: corporates framed it as operational, legal and reputational risk, financial institutions as credit risk, governments as legitimacy risk, and central banks and regulators as systemic financial risk.
The findings make two contributions. First, they demonstrate that accounting for biodiversity is not solely a response to external accountability demands but the product of ongoing risk construction that actively creates demand for new accounting infrastructures, metrics, and frameworks. Second, they extend risk translation studies by revealing that translations unfold through stages in which conditions of possibility establish new risk visibility, critical inflexion points enable conceptual shifts, and actors gradually become engaged, reshaping possibilities for accounting and environmental risk governance.
How to cite: Pirozzi, L.: Constructing Biodiversity Risk: A Processual Study of Translation, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-306, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-306, 2026.
The world is facing accelerating biodiversity loss, escalating climate risks and more frequent natural disasters, with profound but poorly measured implications for firms and financial markets. While climate finance research has advanced rapidly, biodiversity finance still lacks decision-grade, firm-level indicators that reflect how managers and investors actually talk about nature under scrutiny. This project answers that gap by using earnings conference calls (ECCs) to construct dynamic measures of biodiversity, climate and natural-disaster risks and opportunities, and to examine how these disclosures shape financial outcomes.
Methodologically, we combine expert- and ChatGPT-assisted annotation with transformer-based language models (BERT/FinBERT). We first build a high-quality labelled dataset of ECC excerpts related to biodiversity, climate (transition and physical risks, plus opportunities) and natural disasters. We then fine-tune models on these data and apply them to a global ECC corpus to generate firm-year indicators, disaggregated by risk type and opportunity. These indicators allow us to move beyond static ESG ratings and dictionary methods towards nuanced, high-frequency measures of environmental risk salience.
Empirically, we pursue four research aims. (1) We map how disclosure intensity varies across firms, sectors and geographies, paying special attention to resource-intensive industries and firms located in biodiversity-rich or climate-vulnerable ecoregions. (2) We examine how disclosures respond to major policy shocks, including the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and US deregulatory episodes affecting the Endangered Species Act. (3) We assess short-term market reactions by relating disclosure around ECC dates to abnormal stock returns. (4) We study longer-run consequences for profitability, valuation, risk, analyst forecasts, investor base and ESG performance, and compare the pricing and real effects of biodiversity versus climate and natural-disaster exposure.
By supplying decision-useful measures aligned with emerging frameworks such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, we aim to strengthen nature finance and help investors, firms and regulators integrate biodiversity risks and opportunities into core decision-making.
How to cite: Guo, C., Groom, B., Balmford, B., and Xin, W.: When Stakeholders Ask: Measuring Biodiversity, Climate, and Natural Disaster Risks and Opportunities from Earnings Conference Calls, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-935, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-935, 2026.
Businesses across sectors increasingly require biodiversity-related information to meet rising expectations for sustainability, transparency, and nature-positive action. Yet many firms continue to struggle with how biodiversity data can be meaningfully integrated into strategic decision-making and credible sustainability communication. This research introduces a theoretical lens for biodiversity-centric strategic marketing that positions open-access biodiversity data as a strategic enabler of business sustainability. Grounded in Resource-Advantage theory, the framework conceptualizes how firms build trust in systemic change through three interconnected forms of trust: trust in value chain actors, trust in biodiversity-related exchange actions, and trust in open-access biodiversity data. Together, these forms of trust strengthen corporate capacity to assess, disclose, and manage biodiversity impacts and dependencies across different stages of business activity.
The study demonstrates how open-access biodiversity data (e.g., Biodiversity Intactness Index) and database (e.g., WWF Biodiversity Risk Filter) can support corporate biodiversity assessments and alignment with the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. A key contribution is the development of a Corporate Site Biodiversity Index (CSBI), applied to 3,674 pharmaceutical corporate sites across the US, UK, Switzerland, France, Finland, India, and other regions. Empirically, CSBI significantly predicts site-level reputational capital (β = .46; t = 31.27; p < .001). Consistent with Resource-Advantage theory, this finding demonstrates how biodiversity-related intangible resources—trust, ethics, and sustainability legitimacy—translate into competitive advantage. CSBI operationalizes “trust in systemic change” by providing verifiable, data-driven evidence of nature-positive performance, creating decentralized stakeholder confidence that extends beyond traditional corporate communications.
The research further illustrates how biodiversity data can support value-creation initiatives such as biodiversity-related innovation and the development of new strategic assets. This includes private biodiversity-focused funds, pioneering biodiversity bonds, and the conceptualization of synthetic stablecoins or other tokenized instruments in which biodiversity data serve as the underlying reference asset. These can be operationalized through decentralized ecosystems, including blockchain infrastructures such as the Solana and Ethereum networks.
Overall, the study provides a scalable framework for businesses seeking to incorporate biodiversity data into sustainability marketing strategy. By integrating biodiversity-centric actions with transparent, data-driven marketing practices, companies can contribute to nature-positive outcomes while strengthening organizational resilience, reputational capital, and long-term legitimacy.
How to cite: Tan, T. M. and Prabhu, J.: Using Biodiversity Data for Business Sustainability: A Global Corporate Site Biodiversity Index (CSBI) and Trust-Based Strategic Marketing Framework, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-540, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-540, 2026.
This paper explores the socioeconomic exposure to nature-related risks (NRR) in Germany. Therefore, the research proposes to revisit the intricate relationship between nature and the economy to establish a conceptual framework. Adopting a strong sustainability perspective, the conceptual framework underscores the critical role of nature’s contributions to the economy, making use of Herman Daly’s (1995) inverted pyramid. Highlighting material dependencies on ecosystem services (ES) and anthropogenic impacts, this study assesses Germany’s exposure to NRR by mapping the distribution of risks across the global production network. Based on previous research by Hadji-Lazaro et al. (2023) and Svartzman et al. (2021) and utilising the multiregional and environmentally extended input-output table EXIOBASE 3, the research assigns materiality scores to various sectors based on the ENCORE framework (2021, 2024), revealing significant exposures in exports, private, and public revenues as well as employment-related indicators. The findings indicate that exports are the most exposed. In employment terms, high-skilled workers and female employees seem generally less affected. Water-related ecosystems and the climate are identified as the most impacted while also the most critical when providing ES. Sector-specific analysis highlights processing and manufacturing as high-risk areas, with the Construction sector amplifying risks throughout the economy. The study advocates for a precautionary approach that embeds economic activities within biophysical limits to address biodiversity loss and rising emissions. Additionally, the findings underscore the dynamics of contagion along the network structure of production whereby effects are not geographically contained but rather spill along the supply chain. Further research should investigate the results in a temporal and spatially explicit perspective. Policies aiming at structural change can benefit from this analysis in analysing the key role of certain sectors, as well as the importance of ES in particular supply chains. Thus, the research is an initial step in assessing NRR to be extended with further perspectives on the likelihood of risk materialization alongside adaptive capacities.
How to cite: Marpe, M.: The Sound of Silence-Assessing the socioeconomic exposure to nature-related risks in German supply chains, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-744, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-744, 2026.
