If you've sat in a room trying to explain ecosystem services to a CFO, or spent months assembling biodiversity data only to watch a board meeting move on without a decision, this one is for you.
The challenges sustainability teams face with biodiversity are not primarily scientific. Most of us understand the urgency. The harder problem is organisational: how do you take something as genuinely complex as nature-related risk and translate it into the language, the evidence, and the argument that moves a large organisation?
We've spoken to sustainability leaders across renewable energy, mining, financial services, real estate, and consumer goods. The same ten challenges come up again and again. Here's a summary about each of them:
1. We have access to a lot of biodiversity-related information, but when leadership asks us to summarise our exposure, we struggle to give a clear answer. Why is that?
Because most biodiversity data collection starts in the wrong place. Teams tend to gather everything available (species lists, habitat classifications, ecosystem service assessments) without first asking what decision the data is supposed to support. The result is a comprehensive dataset that doesn't answer the specific question on the table.
The fix is to start with the decision, not the data. What is your board actually asking? Usually it's one of three things: where are our highest-risk assets, what are our disclosure obligations, or what would happen to our operations if a specific ecosystem degraded further? Each of those questions requires a different subset of data, and being clear about which question you're answering makes the analysis far more tractable.
2. Carbon has CO₂ equivalent. What's the biodiversity equivalent, and how do we make progress without one?
There isn't one, and that's both the honest answer and the starting point for a more useful conversation with leadership. The absence of a single metric is a big challenge, but it's often used as a reason to delay action when it should be a reason to think more carefully about what you're trying to measure.
The mistake is conflating two different questions. The first is: what are our biodiversity outcomes? That is hard to measure and requires ecological expertise. The second is: where does our exposure sit? That's a question about the location of your assets relative to areas of high biodiversity sensitivity, and it can be answered now with existing spatial data.
Most boards asking about biodiversity are really asking the second question, not the first. Reframing the conversation from outcome measurement to exposure assessment is one of the most practically useful moves a sustainability team can make. It doesn't dodge the complexity; it addresses the question that's being asked.
3. Our initial biodiversity risk screening flagged almost every part of our operations and supply chain. How do you make that actionable?
This is one of the most common experiences teams describe, and it's almost always a sign that the screening was too broad rather than that the risk is uniformly severe. When everything is red, the problem is usually that the analysis hasn't been filtered by materiality.
The answer is prioritisation, not more data. Look at the intersection of two things: where is your ecological exposure highest, and where does that exposure connect to a financial consequence your organisation actually cares about? An asset near a Key Biodiversity Area that has no operational dependency on that ecosystem and no regulatory exposure is a different risk profile from one that draws water from a stressed watershed. Both might flag in a broad screen. Only one is material in the near term.
4. The sustainability team understands the biodiversity risk picture. But procurement, finance, and operations treat it as our problem, not theirs. How do you change that?
This is almost always a language problem before it's anything else. The framing that works inside sustainability functions (ecosystem services, nature positive, biodiversity net gain) doesn't travel well across to teams whose priorities are cost control, operational continuity, and risk management.
The most effective translation isn't about dumbing down the science. It's about connecting it to concepts that already carry weight in the function you're talking to. For procurement, the relevant frame is supply chain continuity and input cost volatility. For risk teams, it's undisclosed exposure on the risk register. For finance, it's the cost of capital and access to sustainability-linked green bonds. For legal, it's disclosure obligations and fiduciary duty.
5. Our leadership acknowledges that biodiversity loss is a problem in the abstract, but treats it as a reputational or CSR issue rather than something that affects the bottom line. How do you shift that?
The reputational framing is where biodiversity ends up when the financial case hasn't been made clearly enough. The goal is to make nature-related risk feel as concrete as any other category of operational or financial risk, because in many sectors, it already is.
The most reliable way to shift perception is to connect biodiversity to something the C-suite is already managing. Three connections tend to land: investor and lender scrutiny (financial institutions are under increasing pressure from their own regulators to assess nature-related risk in portfolios, and companies that can't demonstrate management of that risk will face consequences for cost of capital and access to green finance); regulatory trajectory (TNFD is following TCFD's path from voluntary to expected, and companies that wait for mandatory requirements will face the same scramble as late climate disclosers); and supply chain cost (ecosystem degradation is already driving commodity price volatility in agriculture, forestry, and water-intensive industries. This isn't a future risk in many sectors; it's a present one).
6. Our leadership wants to see measurable returns within a reporting cycle. How do you make the case for something whose benefits materialise over years or decades?
You separate the timeline of the problem from the timeline of action. Ecological recovery is slow, that's true and shouldn't be obscured. But the risk management value of understanding and disclosing your exposure is immediate. The moment your organisation can demonstrate to an investor, lender, or regulator that you have assessed your biodiversity footprint and identified your material risks, you have already reduced your disclosure risk. That's a near-term outcome even if the ecological outcome takes longer.
The early wins from biodiversity investment aren't in habitat restoration or species recovery. They're in regulatory preparedness, investor confidence, licence-to-operate security, and the ability to access green finance instruments that increasingly require nature-related key performance indicators. These are measurable in reporting cycles.
7. Our organisation is deep in the middle of its climate strategy. Adding a parallel biodiversity workstream feels like competing for the same limited resource. How do you integrate rather than compete?
The most effective teams don't position biodiversity as an addition to the climate strategy; they position it as the part of the nature climate strategy that's currently missing. The two agendas are converging whether organisations plan for it or not.
Land use change is one of the largest drivers of both carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. Nature-based solutions, which are increasingly central to corporate net zero strategies, require credible biodiversity impact assessment to be defensible. And the regulatory frameworks are developing in parallel, with many of the same institutional investors and policy bodies driving both. A company that addresses climate without addressing biodiversity and other elements of nature, will find an increasing number of gaps in its strategy as standards evolve.
8. Our team has strong climate and ESG competence, but biodiversity feels like a specialism we don't have. Where does a non-specialist organisation start?
This is a barrier that's become significantly more manageable over the past few years, because the tools and frameworks have been built with exactly this constraint in mind. You don't need in-house ecologists to begin assessing your biodiversity exposure. What you need is location-based data that translates ecological information into risk terms your team can work with.
The practical starting point for most organisations is spatial screening: understanding where your assets, operations, and key supply chain geographies sit in relation to areas of high biodiversity value and sensitivity. This doesn't require field surveys or specialist ecological knowledge. It requires good data and a clear methodology.
Where in-house expertise does matter is in interpretation and in building the internal capability to keep the analysis current as your portfolio evolves and as disclosure requirements develop. Investing in that capability (whether through training, hiring, or embedding biodiversity literacy across sustainability, procurement, and risk functions) is one of the priorities that consistently separates organisations that embed nature into decision-making from those that treat it as a periodic exercise.
9. We use external consultants for our biodiversity assessments. Is there an argument for building more internal capability, or is that unnecessary given the pace the field is moving at?
Consultants are valuable, and they're not going away; the best ones are genuinely useful for project-level depth and for keeping pace with methodological developments. But there's a meaningful distinction between commissioning a bespoke assessment and having an ongoing internal capability.
A consultant answers a specific question at a point in time. It's slow, it's periodic, and the institutional knowledge tends to leave with the engagement. An internal capability means your team can screen new acquisitions, respond to investor queries, incorporate biodiversity into procurement decisions, and keep your disclosure current without going back to the market each time. As the pace of regulatory development increases and as investor scrutiny of nature-related disclosure intensifies, the frequency of those needs will increase too.
10. We've made some progress: a board paper approved, a pilot screening commissioned, some initial data gathered. How do we stop this from stalling at the initiative stage and turn it into something that changes how decisions are made?
The shift from initiative to organisational capability is the hardest part, and it's where most biodiversity strategies stall. The reason is usually one of two things: the strategy depends on one or two internal champions whose departure or reassignment would end it, or it sits entirely within the sustainability function without connecting to the decisions made by finance, procurement, or operations.
The durability question is really a governance question. Who owns this outside the sustainability team? Endorsement without ownership rarely shifts capital or procurement decisions. Nature becomes part of how a business is run when the accountability extends beyond the sustainability function: when biodiversity criteria appear in project approval processes, in supplier contracts, in acquisition due diligence, in treasury's green finance framework.
Document assumptions and outcomes as you go. Treat the business case as a living document that updates as your data improves, as regulatory expectations change, and as your portfolio evolves. Communicate early wins in real time, even if they're modest: a flagged acquisition risk, a permitting process that went more smoothly because of early ecological screening, an investor query answered credibly. These build the organisational memory that makes the programme resilient to personnel changes and budget cycles.
The ten challenges described here are consistent across sectors, geographies, and organisation sizes. They are structural and organisational rather than scientific. Which means the path forward is not only about gathering authoritative data but also about building the internal case, the right language, and the governance that makes biodiversity a permanent part of how risk and resilience are managed.
If any of these challenges resonate with where your organisation is, we'd love to talk through the specifics. Contact the IBAT team at ibat@ibat-alliance.org
