The corporate sustainability landscape is experiencing a fundamental shift as biodiversity moves from the periphery to the center of strategic planning. With Brazil preparing to host COP30 in Belém in November 2025 and the Rio Trio Initiative driving unprecedented collaboration between climate, biodiversity, and land use conventions, businesses worldwide are recognizing that climate action alone is insufficient to ensure a sustainable future.

This convergence of environmental crises demands a new approach—one that integrates biodiversity considerations into the core of corporate sustainability strategies, moving beyond compliance to create regenerative business models that actively restore and protect the natural systems upon which all economic activity depends.

The Biodiversity-Climate Nexus Takes Center Stage

The interconnected nature of climate change and biodiversity loss has reached a critical tipping point. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) published its landmark Nexus Report in December, finding that delayed action on biodiversity goals could as much as double costs, also increasing the probability of irreplaceable losses such as species extinctions.

The Rio Trio Initiative, launched by Azerbaijan (COP29), Colombia (COP16), and Saudi Arabia (COP16), represents an unprecedented collaboration aimed at fostering global sustainability efforts by aligning the work of the UN Convention on Climate Change, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. This initiative recognizes that isolated efforts will not achieve the desired goals and emphasizes the need for systemic action and the recognition of synergies between environmental conventions.

As we approach COP30 in Brazil, expectations are high for strengthened global ambition and unity, with COP30 expected to place a strong focus on nature. Brazil's unique position as the most biologically diverse country in the world, home to up to 20% of the world's species, underscores the critical importance of this moment for global biodiversity action.

The Business Case for Biodiversity Action

The economic implications of biodiversity loss are staggering. Ecosystem services contribute to more than half of global GDP, amounting to $44tn annually, while more than half of global GDP (USD 44 trillion) is dependent on intact ecosystems. For businesses, this translates into both significant risks and unprecedented opportunities.

Around $7.2 trillion of total enterprise value remains exposed to unmanaged biodiversity risk, according to recent research analyzing the world's largest listed companies. This exposure manifests in multiple ways:

Dependencies and Physical Risks: Industries that depend on natural resources, such as agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and textiles, are particularly vulnerable, facing supply chain disruptions, increased raw material costs, and reputational risks. Ecosystem services decline can physically impact business locations, creating operational vulnerabilities that extend far beyond traditional risk assessments.

Regulatory Pressures: The European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which came into effect in 2024, requires companies to report not only on the financial risks posed by biodiversity loss but also on the impact their operations have on the environment – a concept known as double materiality. This directive covers over 50,000 companies in the EU and sets a new standard for corporate sustainability disclosure globally.

Conducting Biodiversity Baselines and Assessments

The foundation of any effective biodiversity strategy lies in comprehensive assessment of impacts and dependencies. Most organizations don't have the information needed to understand how their financial performance can be affected by their dependencies on nature — nor how company operations affect ecosystems.

Understanding the Assessment Landscape

Modern biodiversity assessment requires understanding two critical dimensions:

Impacts vs. Dependencies: Until now, biodiversity footprinting was limited to measuring impact on biodiversity, while assessments of dependencies excluded this impact, leaving a critical gap in our understanding. Leading organizations are now combining biodiversity impact assessment with ecosystem service dependency analysis to create comprehensive risk profiles.

Scope and Boundaries: Dependencies and impacts can occur throughout the value chain, both direct and indirect impacts (i.e. from vendors, suppliers, or consumers) need to be assessed. The main drivers of loss within MSCI ACWI, ranked from highest to lowest, are climate change, pollution, land use and water use.

The LEAP Approach

TNFD developed the LEAP approach — a step-by-step process for companies seeking to understand their nature-related dependencies and impacts. This methodology provides a structured framework for organizations to:

• Locate their interface with nature across operations and value chains

• Evaluate dependencies and impacts on nature

• Assess material risks and opportunities

• Prepare to respond and report on findings

Leveraging Available Tools

Organizations can utilize several sophisticated assessment tools:

• The WWF Biodiversity Risk Filter is a free online tool that enables companies and financial institutions to Inform, Explore, Assess, and Act on biodiversity risks

• ENCORE sets out how the economy – sectors, subsectors and activities – depends and impacts on nature

• Biodiversity Impact Analytics – Global Biodiversity Score (BIA-GBS) measures the biodiversity impact of companies as well as their dependencies to ecosystemic services

Science-Based Targets for Nature (SBTN)

The Science Based Targets Network has emerged as the gold standard for corporate biodiversity action. In March 2025, SBTN launched the first-ever ocean science-based targets – completing the initial suite of science-based targets for nature with a clear framework for environmental action across freshwater, land, and now ocean.

The SBTN Framework

Science-based targets network identifies this as a 5 step process:

1. Assess: This step gives you a high-level understanding of environmental materiality of your activities and an overview of the pressures and the state of nature associated with your value chain

2. Prioritize: Prioritize areas where action has the biggest overall impact, considering actions from your operations and across your value chain to the landscapes surrounding your value chain

3. Measure, Set & Validate: This step is where you set and validate your science-based targets

4. Act: Implementation guidance is currently being developed

5. Track: Monitoring and verification frameworks are in development

Early Corporate Adopters

Global biopharma company GSK, global luxury group Kering and building materials company Holcim are the first set of companies to move forward with publicly disclosing and adopting their targets. These early adopters are demonstrating the practical feasibility of science-based biodiversity targets:

• GSK: Implemented the SBTN's guidance to validate its approach to freshwater, focusing on its manufacturing site in Nashik, India, which is located in a water-stressed basin

• Holcim: With its granular water data for its direct operations, was able to set an ambitious target to reduce freshwater withdrawals in its direct operations, targeting the Moctezuma basin in Mexico

The pilot program's success is underscored by the majority (60%) of participating companies receiving validation for some or all of their targets.

Nature-Positive Strategies in Action

Regenerative Agriculture: Leading the Transformation

Regenerative agriculture has emerged as a cornerstone of nature-positive business strategies. At its core, regenerative agriculture is farming and ranching in harmony with nature, with practices that increase overall species diversity while reducing pest population densities.

Momentum is building for regenerative agriculture, a set of approaches that could help farms to weather the changing climate and make them more profitable. European farmers are at the forefront of this transition, with Europe's need to meet its commitments to restore ecosystems and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions driving adoption of these practices.

Key Regenerative Practices: Practices include maximal recycling of farm waste and adding composted material from non-farm sources, alongside polycultures, mixed crop rotation, cover cropping, organic soil management, and low- or no-tillage methods.

Corporate Leadership: The Regenerative Fund for Nature aims to transform fashion supply chains by shifting 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of farms and grazing lands to regenerative agriculture spaces by 2026, demonstrating how industry-specific approaches can scale impact.

Ecosystem Restoration at Scale

The UN Decade of Restoration recognizes that we have less than a decade to fundamentally transform our relationship with the rest of life on Earth. This urgency has driven innovation in restoration approaches that integrate business needs with ecological outcomes.

Economic Imperative: The loss of just six of the services healthy ecosystems provide—crop pollination, coastal protection, supply of water, timber production, marine fisheries and carbon storage—could drain nearly $10 trillion from the global economy by 2050, while a sustainable pathway would generate a net gain of $490 billion.

Scalable Solutions: Currently, most restoration projects target small areas using costly manual methods that cannot be scaled up to meet global commitments. The solution lies in judicious integration of agricultural practices into ecological restoration.

The Evolution of European Policy

The Nature Restoration Regulation is the first continent-wide, comprehensive law of its kind, establishing binding targets that cover at least 20% of the EU's land and sea areas by 2030, and ultimately all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050.

The regulation includes specific targets for:

• Agricultural ecosystems – increasing grassland butterflies and farmland birds, the stock of organic carbon in cropland mineral soils, and the share of agricultural land with high-diversity landscape features

• Marine ecosystems – restoring marine habitats such as seagrass beds or sediment bottoms

• River connectivity – identifying and removing barriers that prevent the connectivity of surface waters, so that at least 25 000 km of rivers are restored to a free-flowing state by 2030

Biodiversity Credits: Emerging Market Mechanisms

The biodiversity credit market represents a nascent but rapidly evolving mechanism for mobilizing private capital toward nature conservation. While the current market for voluntary biodiversity credits is estimated at around $8 million, scaling-up the market will require a clear business case, as well as aligning on common principles of integrity and governance.

Market Structure and Governance

The Biodiversity Credit Alliance (BCA) has released its 2025–2026 Strategic Plan, charting a path to build a transparent, trustworthy, and high-integrity global biodiversity credit market. BCA's vision is a transparent, trustworthy and efficient global market in biodiversity credits founded on just and equitable principles, and underpinned by innovation.

Key Design Principles: BCA considers biodiversity credits to be an effective complement to, but not a replacement of, the private sector's supply chain transformation efforts. This approach recognizes that credits must support rather than substitute for direct corporate action on biodiversity.

Early Market Development

We saw some large corporates purchase biodiversity credits (e.g. Air New Zealand for ~$600,000 or ISA Interconexión Eléctrica for an undisclosed sum), though they were either mixed with other ecosystem services (i.e. carbon) or probably not big enough.

The market is still grappling with fundamental questions: Unlike with greenhouse gas emissions, which can be measured in tonnes, there is no single standardised metric that can account for nature's complexity. This challenge has led to diverse methodological approaches, with some issuing credits based on biodiversity gains while other schemes reward management instead of outcomes.

Future Market Potential

If the top 500 global businesses committed 1% of corporate profits to meeting nature targets, it could amount to $43 billion per year, demonstrating the significant potential for scaling biodiversity finance through market mechanisms.

Partnerships with NGOs and Implementation

The complexity of biodiversity challenges necessitates collaborative approaches that leverage the expertise and on-ground presence of conservation organizations. Conservation International manages the fund and provides technical input into project selection and implementation for the Regenerative Fund for Nature, demonstrating how corporate-NGO partnerships can drive meaningful conservation outcomes.

Strategic Partnership Models

Effective biodiversity partnerships often involve multiple stakeholders working across different scales and timeframes. A single project can involve many organisations. Drumadoon includes a landowner, a credit scheme company, a rewilding charity, a project developer, a local community group and a carbon-trading platform.

Indigenous and Local Community Engagement: BCA is working together with the Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities to ensure strong foundations and principles exist and can be applied by all market participants going forward. Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPs and LCs) are frontline stewards of nature, making their inclusion essential for credible biodiversity initiatives.

Technical Collaboration Frameworks

Leading organizations are establishing formal frameworks for ongoing collaboration. Among them are Accenture, Baringa, Berkeley Capital, Carbon Space, Creditnature, Downforce, Dunya Analytics, Heineken, Kuyua, Lenzing, Nala Earth, Novo Nordisk, Perigon Partners, Robobank, Toyota North America, We Don't Need Roads and Zero Mission participating in SBTN's corporate engagement programs.

Council Fire's Role in Corporate Biodiversity Strategy

As companies navigate this complex landscape, the need for strategic guidance that bridges science, policy, and business reality has never been greater. Council Fire's approach to biodiversity integration reflects our core brand pillars of systems thinking, radical partnership, and action over abstraction.

Our Integrated Approach

Drawing on our expertise in climate resilience and sustainable business transformation, Council Fire helps organizations develop biodiversity strategies that are both scientifically rigorous and commercially viable. We understand that effective biodiversity action requires:

• Systems-Level Integration: Connecting biodiversity considerations with climate strategy, supply chain transformation, and stakeholder engagement

• Local Relevance: Ensuring that global frameworks translate into context-specific action plans

• Stakeholder-Centered Planning: Engaging communities, NGOs, and industry partners to build collaborative solutions

Strategic Services for Biodiversity Action

Biodiversity Assessment and Strategy Development: We guide companies through comprehensive impact and dependency assessments, utilizing leading tools and frameworks while ensuring alignment with business objectives and regulatory requirements.

Science-Based Target Implementation: Our team supports organizations in setting and validating science-based targets for nature, drawing on SBTN methodologies while addressing sector-specific challenges and opportunities.

Partnership Facilitation: Leveraging our networks across government, NGO, and private sectors, we help companies build the collaborative relationships essential for effective biodiversity action.

Regenerative Business Model Design: We work with organizations to identify opportunities for regenerative practices that deliver both biodiversity benefits and business value, from supply chain transformation to new revenue models.

The Path Forward: Building Resilient, Nature-Positive Businesses

The integration of biodiversity into corporate sustainability strategies represents more than a compliance exercise—it's a fundamental reimagining of how businesses create value in an interconnected world. Science-based targets for nature, endorsed by civil society, provide a credible and prescriptive approach to achieve these goals.

As we approach COP30 and the critical biodiversity targets of 2030, companies that act decisively on biodiversity will position themselves as leaders in the nature-positive economy. Setting targets through the Science Based Targets Network means your company or city can be confident of doing enough to help halt and reverse nature loss and harness the opportunities this presents.

The convergence of regulatory pressure, investor expectations, and operational necessity creates an unprecedented opportunity for businesses to drive positive change while building competitive advantage. Companies that embrace this challenge—working with partners like Council Fire to navigate complexity with clarity—will not only contribute to global biodiversity goals but will build the resilience and adaptability essential for long-term success.

The question is no longer whether to integrate biodiversity into corporate strategy, but how quickly and effectively organizations can make this transition. In a world where nature and business success are increasingly inseparable, the companies that lead on biodiversity today will be the ones that thrive tomorrow.

Ready to develop a comprehensive biodiversity strategy that aligns with your business objectives?

Council Fire's team of sustainability experts can help you navigate the complexities of biodiversity assessment, target setting, and implementation. Contact us to explore how we can partner with you in building a nature-positive future.