Every business depends on nature. Fewer than 1% disclose this relationship.

Businesses undervalue the natural world at their own risk. That was a recurring theme at a recent panel on biodiversity and business at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, which brought together voices from academia, finance, mining, and the water industry.

Less than 1% of publicly reporting companies mention their impacts on biodiversity in their disclosures, according to the IPBES Business and Biodiversity report published in February. That’s despite the fact that, as the multinational organisation puts it, “Every business depends on biodiversity, and every business impacts biodiversity.”

Nature has long been treated as an externality, a cost absorbed by ecosystems and communities rather than businesses, and most companies still treat biodiversity as a peripheral concern rather than a strategic one. Professor Kathy Willis, a biodiversity scientist and UK parliamentarian, notes that on most boards she encounters, nature sits under ESG and is considered at the end of the meeting. It ought, she argues, to be on the risk register alongside every other material business risk.  

Too often, a green roof on the factory and a tree-planting initiative pass for serious strategy, while trillions of dollars of potential impact sit in industrial processes, supply chains, and waste streams. David Craig, co-chair of the TNFD, a market-led global taskforce for reporting and acting on nature-related risks, calls this the “bees and trees problem.” 

The language is part of the issue. Craig argues that the word “biodiversity” triggers a “complexity reaction” in boardrooms, conjuring images of species counts and ecological surveys rather than the more fundamental question of what a company actually relies on to operate. He recalls a prominent technology firm that assessed its nature dependencies and concluded it had none, ignoring the water and rare earth minerals needed for its data centres and the electronic waste created by its hardware.  

Our recent research with RepRisk shows that just 16% of financial services executives rank nature and biodiversity among their top conduct risks over the past year. Yet across the economy, a growing number of investors and regulators are beginning to scrutinise nature-related risks with the same rigour they now apply to climate.

Coca-Cola offers one example of the emerging business case for managing environmental impact. By mapping its water dependencies at the local catchment level rather than relying on global averages, the beverage giant has reduced the water it uses per litre of product from roughly three litres to under two, reducing costs and improving supply resilience across operations in more than 200 countries. 

The argument that companies lack the tools to act is increasingly difficult to sustain. The TNFD provides a measurement framework organised around the five scientifically identified drivers of harm to the natural world: land use change, resource overuse, invasive species, pollution, and climate change. The IPBES report, meanwhile, sets out more than 100 specific actions for businesses, governments, and financial institutions, including mapping nature dependencies, reforming harmful subsidies, and improving disclosure across value chains. Few companies can now credibly claim they don’t know how to begin.