Businesses Must Make Biodiversity Health A Top KPI

Businesses depend on nature and biodiversity to make their products and services, whether it be a specific plant or animal species or an entire ecosystem. Pretty obvious, right? But “unsustainable economic activity and a focus on growth as measured by the gross domestic product, has been a driver of the decline of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people and stands in the way of transformative change”, states a major report on Earth’s biodiversity. Since 1992, stocks of ‘natural capital’ per person have declined by 40%. The business community does not appear to be connecting the dots that they need their raw materials to be alive and well if they, themselves, want to remain alive and well.

It’s crass to talk about nature in economic terms, but we must. For those who look at the world through a lens of dollars and cents, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, woof) is for them. It argues that the current dire state of nature’s decline foreshadows business’s own imminent decline and presents a systemic risk to the global economy. IPBES is the world’s leading body on biodiversity, and this report was signed off on last week by 140 countries, who apparently support the notion that the world’s focus on GDP is harmful to nature. The report lays out 100 actions businesses can take to become helpers rather than pure destroyers of nature.

As a point of grounding, the IPBES report found that “in 2023, an estimated $7.3 trillion of public and private finance flowed into business activities that are harmful to nature, while just $220 billion goes to activities that conserve biodiversity”. Furthermore, “governments subsidise activities driving nature’s destruction by $2.4 trillion each year.” That’s a whole lot of nature-harming without consequences or accountability. We haven’t even addressed the concept of giving nature the time and space to recoup its losses and replenish. But how could we, when we operate in an economic system built on short term reporting cycles and trend-chasing decision-making? Nature, in contrast, is patient and takes a long-term approach to most of its endeavors.

Throughout modern history and today, companies have been able to extract and destroy our planet’s natural resources for free. They get to bulldoze rainforests, dump toxic waste into rivers, hunt animals and plants to extinction, and erase biodiversity and replace it with mono crops, to name just a few of the worst transgressions. The value of nature is simply not something companies consider under the current model of unchecked growth. Case in point, the IPBES report notes that less than 1% of public companies even mention biodiversity in their impact reports. 

Capitalism’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy regarding nature’s sacrifices has run its course. Ignorance and neglect can no longer be acceptable loopholes for succeeding in the global economy, or else risk systemic breakdown. It is time instead for an acute focus on the health and abundance of all the inputs of a product or service, and the natural ecosystems they rely on. Yes, this is another call for massive systemic change.

Last week The New York Times published an article about so-called “desire paths”, referring to alternate trails stomped into the snow, after the plows and shovels clear out the main pathways of a city or park. Desire paths are formed when people with similar inclinations go their own way, which then become shared alternative ways. It’s quite a poetic phenomenon. “They remind us that we have a choice, and that we can veer away from what was laid out for us.” What if companies embraced this mentality to create desire paths for how they want to show up in this age of peak capitalism? What if they acknowledged the actual and scientific evidence that the age of rampant nature destruction for pure profit is unsustainable and unacceptable? Would others follow, trodding this same pathway of desire for a better way? It is crucial to remember that companies and governments are made up of individual people. People who, mostly, have morals and who definitely have desires. It is time for the desire of wanting to live an ideal, abundant life on Earth, including one where businesses can prosper responsibly, to prevail. There are no more excuses.