Playing nice with Business won’t save biodiversity
This blog was written by Nele Marien, Coordinator of the Forests and Biodiversity programme of Friends of the Earth International
As ecosystems collapse and species extinction accelerates, one idea refuses to die: businesses just need the right encouragement to do the right thing.
On Sunday, February 8th, the Business and Biodiversity Assessment was adopted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). It is careful, methodologically rich and full of detail.
The report recognises that biodiversity loss is structurally driven. It highlights current economic systems, profit-driven business models and short-term financial logics as fundamentally incompatible with halting and reversing biodiversity decline. It also identifies harmful subsidies, corporate lobbying, concentration of power, and inequality as key drivers of biodiversity loss, while underlining the importance of strong language on Indigenous Peoples’ rights and free, prior and informed consent.
Even so, despite identifying several critical aspects of the biodiversity crisis, the report ultimately draws problematic conclusions.
The entire report is based on a familiar and dangerous assumption: businesses are not sufficiently aware of their dependence on biodiversity and their impact on it. Supposedly, if they were, they would perform better with the right support (the right “enabling environment”). However, instead of treating it as the assumption that it is, the report treats it as fact.
It is an appealing story that we have been hearing for decades. It is also a misleading assumption.
The problem isn’t ignorance — it’s profit
Believing that companies will behave better with new data or tools that help them become aware of their dependence and impact on biodiversity is a misinterpretation of reality.
Most major corporations are not confused about their impacts on nature. Mining companies know what open pits do to ecosystems. Agribusiness knows what monocultures do to soils and pollinators. Fossil fuel companies know exactly how their activities fuel climate and biodiversity breakdown.
The problem is not ignorance. It is that destruction remains profitable, while protection often isn’t.
That simple fact explains why so many companies spend millions lobbying against environmental rules, pushing for deregulation, and warning governments that strong protections will hurt competition. This is not fringe behaviour — it is standard corporate strategy. Yet in the IPBES assessment, this corporate power largely fades into the background.
Businesses are often portrayed as struggling under short-term pressures or poorly designed systems, rather than as powerful actors actively shaping those systems to their advantage.
There’s a famous line often attributed to Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.” Biodiversity loss fits this logic perfectly. Companies understand the problem well enough. Acting on it would simply cost too much.
Voluntary action fails for a reason
One of the most revealing findings is also its most inconvenient: hardly any businesses act on biodiversity at all. According to the report, fewer than one per cent of publicly reporting companies meaningfully disclose biodiversity impacts.
Where disclosure does happen, it is usually because regulation requires it.
The inefficiency of voluntary corporate action on biodiversity should be the central takeaway. Instead, the report doubles down on calls for better metrics, tools and guidance — as if the missing ingredient was yet another framework rather than political will.
There is a simple truth that the report admits, but doesn´t take up in its conclusions: regulation works.
Where biodiversity disclosures are mandatory, uptake rises. Where permits are required, assessments are done. Where clear rules exist, behaviour changes. Every major environmental gain of the past century — clean air laws, bans on toxic chemicals, protections for wildlife — came from binding rules, not goodwill. Biodiversity will be no different.
And yet regulation is treated throughout the assessment as just one option among many — carefully balanced against partnerships, incentives and voluntary commitments. That is not balance. It is allowing corporations an easy escape route that won´t hurt their business.
Not all businesses are equally guilty — or equally persuadable
Another popular claim in the assessment is that “all businesses depend on biodiversity”. While technically true in the abstract, this framing glosses over uncomfortable realities.
Some of the most destructive sectors — mining, oil and gas, petrochemicals, large-scale infrastructure — depend very little on intact ecosystems to remain profitable in the short or medium term. Their business models are built on extraction, land conversion and regulatory leniency.
Appealing to these sectors’ “dependence on nature” is unlikely to change behaviour where continued destruction still pays. Treating business as a single, homogenous actor with a heavy dependence on nature risks promoting actions with those who have an understanding of the importance of biodiversity, and letting the heavy polluters who do not depend on biodiversity off the hook.
Old false solutions, freshly repackaged
Despite acknowledging the severity of biodiversity loss, the report repeatedly turns to market-based instruments as potential solutions: biodiversity credits, offsetting schemes, payments for ecosystem services, green financial products and certification.
These ideas are not new, and neither is their failure. Offsetting has not stopped biodiversity loss; Credits have enabled continued destruction elsewhere; Financial instruments have too often become tools for greenwashing rather than transformation. Certification has been a greenwashing tool with a designed means of deception and severe impacts on peoples in the Global South.
Yet reducing harm is still framed as a “positive impact”, and efficiency gains are presented as progress — even though ecosystems are already being pushed beyond their limits.
At this stage of the biodiversity crisis, being “less bad” is simply not good enough.
The recent Transformative Change report, also by IPBES, clearly states that “incremental action will not be sufficient to save biodiversity”. Yet this new report seems to have forgotten these conclusions, and proposes only incremental actions, while failing to propose the real, necessary changes to address business as a major driver of the biodiversity crisis.
A moment of choice for governments: continue enabling or start enacting
As governments move to implement global biodiversity commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity, this assessment will shape policy choices.
Governments and international institutions can read it as encouragement to continue refining voluntary engagement with business. Or they can read it as evidence that voluntarism has failed.
If they choose the first path, we will see more reporting frameworks, partnerships and promises — alongside continued ecological collapse. If they choose the second, the implications are clear: binding rules, international coordination, and hard limits on how much businesses are permitted to impact biodiversity.
Credit (main image): Palm oil plantations, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, 2015. ©Victor Barro, Friends of the Earth Spain, Friends of the Earth International.
