The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has recently released a new report. For the first time in its history, it published a landmark assessment focused entirely on business. The message? Unambiguous. Every business depends on nature. Every business impacts nature. And every business needs to act.

What is the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment?

The IPBES Methodological Assessment Report on the Impact and Dependence of Business on Biodiversity and Nature’s Contributions to People (yes, that’s a mouthful) was released on 9 February 2026, following the 12th Plenary of IPBES held in Manchester, UK. It was developed over three years by 79 leading experts from 35 countries and was approved by representatives of more than 150 member governments.

This is the first IPBES report directly aimed at business, specifically designed to push companies to assess and disclose their impacts and dependencies on biodiversity.

The hard truth: Every business depends on nature. 

The report doesn’t pull any punches. Biodiversity loss, driven largely by economic activity, now poses what IPBES calls “a critical and pervasive systemic risk” to the economy, financial stability and human wellbeing. Businesses depend on nature more than most realise:

• Agriculture for food or our clothes needs healthy soils, pollinators and reliable rainfall
• Pharmaceuticals rely on genetic diversity found in ecosystems to develop new medicines. 
• Construction depends on timber, minerals and stable land. 
• Tourism needs functioning coastlines, forests and wildlife. 

Even the most digitally-focused company relies on a supply chain that somewhere, somehow, touches the natural world from the raw materials in server hardware to the energy used to power data centres.

The industry’s dependence on nature is deep, structural and largely invisible in most corporate strategies. That invisibility is exactly the problem the new science is asking us to fix.

• At a corporate level: businesses should embed biodiversity into governance and strategy with clear targets that reflect the company’s real-world impacts and dependencies on nature.
• At an operational level: businesses should focus on where their activities physically meet nature by managing sites and operations in ways that benefit local ecosystems and implementing the mitigation hierarchy: avoid, minimise, restore, offset.
• At a value chain level: businesses need to understand where biodiversity risks and dependencies sit across their full supply chain. Mapping and traceability is a practical starting point, and crucial part of the process. 
• At a portfolio level: financial institutions hold significant leverage. Shifting capital away from nature-destructive activities and towards nature-positive businesses is one of the highest-impact actions available to the financial sector. 

Where does your business stand?

At Quest, we’ve been helping companies turn nature from an abstract concept into a strategic priority. The IPBES report confirms what we’ve been working on with our clients: the question is no longer whether biodiversity belongs in your business strategy. It’s how to make that strategy credible, measurable and aligned with science.

Whether you’re taking your first steps towards understanding your nature-related impacts, or you’re ready to build a full biodiversity roadmap, we’re here to help you navigate it.