Business and Biodiversity: opportunities and challenges
Biodiversity fundamentally underpins the benefits that businesses derive from natural capital and supports the key ecosystem functions that ensure the delivery of business operations and productivity.
Businesses, including pharmaceutical companies, food and agri-businesses, forestry industries and construction and packaging sectors use genes, species and ecosystem services as critical inputs into their production processes. They depend on healthy ecosystems to treat and dissipate waste, maintain soil and water quality and help control air composition. Considering these societal and industrial benefits as well as the associated values of these intact ecosystems is vital when exploring land use opportunities and conversion.
Rather than allowing biodiversity risks to manifest themselves in mainstream business, business leaders can take early steps to secure biodiversity, and seize opportunities that enable them to remain at the forefront of their sector. The benefits of such action can include decreased costs from the reduced need of inputs to counter biodiversity degradation and brand enhancement from the implementation of conservation initiatives.
One-pager: Business and Biodiversity: opportunities and challenges
Business and biodiversity: the relationships | ||
Business activities impact biodiversity… | Business activities are vulnerable as they rely upon biodiversity… | External forces are putting pressure on biodiversity… |
What are the biodiversity-related challenges for business? | ||
Land tenure rights, governance and security are uncertain | There is a lack of data demonstrating the links between biodiversity and certain commodities | There is a lack of simplified biodiversity metrics |
What are the biodiversity-related opportunities for business? | ||
 Olam International: reconciling wild nature with large-scale plantations |  Mondi: implementing mitigation measures in production landscapes |  Asda: cooperating for biodiversity |
What do business sustainability leaders say? | ||
On biodiversity data | On ecosystems and ownership | |