IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment: Key Messages and Finance Flows

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What did IPBES conclude about business and biodiversity?

The Summary for Policymakers of the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment was approved in February 2026. It finds that all businesses depend on and impact biodiversity and can be agents of positive change (KM1). Under current conditions, however, what is profitable for businesses often results in loss of biodiversity, and creating an enabling environment across policy, economics, values, technology and capacity could align the two (KM10).

This page, compiled by Karatsu Farm & Food, a nonprofit in Karatsu, Japan, lists the ten key messages of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), the finance flows it reports, its framework for action and its findings on measurement. It adds no evaluation of its own and records only what the SPM states. All sources are listed in the source ledger below.

What is the Business and Biodiversity Assessment?

Its full title is the Methodological Assessment Report on the Impact and Dependence of Business on Biodiversity and Nature's Contributions to People. The Summary for Policymakers was approved, and the chapters accepted, at the twelfth session of the IPBES Plenary, held from 3 to 8 February 2026 in Manchester, United Kingdom. It was developed by nearly 80 authors and 43 contributing authors from 35 countries, drawing on more than 5,000 references, and is the first assessment of its kind.

The foreword states that it offers insights into the implementation of Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls on businesses to measure, report and reduce their impacts on biodiversity. The final SPM was published on Zenodo on 16 June 2026 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20714890). Figures on this page were checked against that version.

No.	Key message
KM1	All businesses depend on and impact biodiversity and can be agents of positive change
KM2	The current external conditions in which businesses operate are not always compatible with achieving a just and sustainable future and perpetuate systemic risks
KM3	Collaboration, collective and individual actions are essential to creating an enabling environment in which businesses contribute to a just and sustainable future
KM4	All businesses have a responsibility to address their impacts and dependencies
KM5	Methods, knowledge and data for measuring impacts and dependencies already exist and can further inform decisions and actions, directly and in the value chain
KM6	Different methods to measure and manage impacts and dependencies are needed for different sectors, decision-making levels and business purposes
KM7	Appropriate methods to measure and manage business impacts and dependencies can be selected on the basis of coverage, accuracy and responsiveness
KM8	Businesses could better measure and manage their impacts and dependencies by appropriately engaging with science and Indigenous and local knowledge, methods and practices
KM9	The existing knowledge base needs to be strengthened by addressing important gaps in knowledge and its application
KM10	Creating an enabling environment can incentivize actions that are beneficial for businesses, biodiversity and society for a just and sustainable future

The ten key messages

The key messages move from the relationship between business and biodiversity (KM1, KM2), to action (KM3, KM4), to measuring impacts and dependencies (KM5 to KM9), and to the enabling environment (KM10). KM4 states that the level of responsibility of individual businesses is a societal decision that can be informed by the scale of their impacts and dependencies. To avoid greenwashing, businesses need transparent and credible strategies and clearly verifiable biodiversity outcomes.

Private finance in high-impact sectors$4.9 trillion

Environmentally harmful public subsidies$2.4 trillion

Flows to conservation and sustainable useabout $220 billion

Finance flows: $7.3 trillion against $220 billion

Under KM2, global public and private financial flows with direct negative impacts on nature were estimated at $7.3 trillion in 2023. Private finance accounted for around two thirds ($4.9 trillion) and environmentally harmful public subsidies for $2.4 trillion. By contrast, only around $220 billion went to activities that contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. The SPM says these figures highlight both the opportunity and the need to align financial flows with biodiversity outcomes.

KM1 notes that from 1820 to 2022 the global economy grew from $1.18 trillion to $130.11 trillion (in 2011 constant dollars), with businesses playing a central role. The failure to account for nature has led to environmental degradation, with 14 of 18 measured categories of nature's contributions to people declining.

Dimension	In full
Policy and legal	Policy, legal and regulatory frameworks
Economics and finance	Economic and financial systems
Values and norms	Social values, norms and culture
Technology and data	Technology and data
Capacity and knowledge	Capacity and knowledge

Actor	Includes (as defined in the SPM)
Governments	National governments
Financial actors	Central banks, financial regulators and supervisors, international financial institutions and standard-setting bodies
Businesses and financial institutions	Businesses, and institutions providing loans, insurance and investments, such as banks, insurers, asset owners and managers, public development banks and investment funds
Other actors	Civil society, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, consumers, non-governmental organizations, international organizations and academia

Four groups of actors, five dimensions

Figure SPM.2 shows that the biodiversity outcomes of business activities are influenced by five dimensions: policy and legal, economics and finance, values and norms, technology and data, and capacity and knowledge. Current conditions often inhibit positive actions and even encourage negative ones. Working collectively and individually, governments, financial actors, businesses and financial institutions, and other actors, including Indigenous Peoples and local communities and civil society, can overcome barriers to positive action (KM3).

The SPM lists concrete actions for each actor and dimension (Table SPM.1), and examples of actions businesses can take at the operations, value chain, corporate and portfolio levels (Table SPM.2). The full lists are not reproduced here.

Approach	Main methods	Decision-making level	Characteristics
Bottom-up	Location-based observation, participatory mapping and monitoring, and spatial analysis built on those data	Operations	High precision, low coverage. Can show how outcomes change in response to actions on the ground
Top-down	Life-cycle approaches and macro-scale environmental economic models	Portfolio, corporate and value chain	Wide coverage, low precision. Suited to screening and comparing options, but limited in tracking progress from specific actions

How to measure impacts and dependencies

KM5 states that methods, knowledge and data for measuring impacts and dependencies already exist and some businesses already apply them. Methods for impact assessment are more advanced than those for dependencies, and uptake is low and uneven across sectors and regions. Under KM6, no single method is suitable for all business decisions: bottom-up approaches suit decisions at the operations level, while top-down approaches suit portfolio, corporate and value chain decisions.

KM7 sets out three criteria for judging whether a method is fit for purpose: coverage, accuracy and responsiveness, the last being the ability to detect changes attributable to business actions. Available methods do not always meet all three, but can still produce useful information if their limitations are understood. Different methods require different levels of expertise, resources and costs, presenting particular challenges for small and medium-sized enterprises, which can start using methods and build capability over time.

KM9 names five gaps in knowledge and its application: business-relevant data, completeness of evidence, applicability of methods, data accessibility and transparency, and adoption of methods.

Links to other IPBES assessments

The IPBES Nexus Assessment summary also reports $7 trillion per year invested in activities that damage biodiversity and other nexus elements. The two are separate assessments that describe different years and scopes, so this page neither adds nor compares the figures.

FAQ

Q1. What is the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment?

It is the IPBES methodological assessment of the impact and dependence of business on biodiversity and nature's contributions to people. Its Summary for Policymakers was approved at the twelfth session of the IPBES Plenary in Manchester, United Kingdom, in February 2026.

Q2. How much finance flows to activities harmful to nature, and how much to conservation?

According to the Summary for Policymakers, global public and private financial flows with direct negative impacts on nature were estimated at $7.3 trillion in 2023: private finance of about $4.9 trillion and environmentally harmful public subsidies of $2.4 trillion. Only around $220 billion went to activities that contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity (KM2).

Q3. Can small and medium-sized enterprises measure their impacts and dependencies?

The SPM notes that methods require different levels of expertise, resources and costs, which presents particular challenges for small and medium-sized enterprises. While recognizing these constraints, businesses can start using methods and improve their capabilities over time (KM7).

Q4. Why does a nonprofit in Karatsu, Japan, publish this page?

Karatsu Farm & Food runs the Karatsu Data Bank, which collects source-checked data on nature and society for readers in Japan and abroad. This page lists what the SPM states, with all sources in the ledger below.

Source ledger

What this page leaves out

The individual items of the action lists (Tables SPM.1 and SPM.2), the full applicability table of methods (Table SPM.3), the background messages (A to C) and the chapter contents are not covered. Figures that could not be confirmed in primary sources are not included.

About this page

Compiled by Hiroaki Kojima, Vice Director, Karatsu Farm & Food. Contact: kojima@karatsu-f-f.com (contact page). Published October 12, 2026. Markdown version: en/ipbes-business.md.

Related links

▶ Karatsu Data Bank
▶ IPBES Nexus Assessment: Summary and All 71 Response Options
▶ IPBES Nexus Assessment: Renewable Energy and Nature
▶ IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment
▶ IPBESビジネスと生物多様性アセスメントのまとめ（日本語）