Biodiversity Reporting Surge: 91% of Fortune 500 Firms Never Measure It at All
The wave of mandatory nature disclosure heading toward the world’s largest companies is arriving with a structural flaw built in — and a new peer-reviewed study published last week in the Journal of Cleaner Production provides the first globally-mapped evidence of exactly how that flaw works.
Researchers at Sweden’s Lund University analyzed 89 of the world’s largest companies operating in the industries with the heaviest footprint on the natural world — food, beverages and tobacco, energy and mining, apparel, chemicals, and construction — and found that just eight of them (9%) used any biodiversity indicator at all in their decision-making. Only eight companies out of 89 used any biodiversity indicator. Of those eight, only two used more than one indicator simultaneously. That second number, the researchers say, is the more consequential finding — because using a single biodiversity indicator to guide corporate decisions is not merely incomplete. It is scientifically structured to produce wrong conclusions.
“Different indicators measure different aspects of nature,” said William Sidemo Holm, a researcher at Lund University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and lead author of the study. “Our results show that no single biodiversity indicator provides a complete picture. Companies that rely on only one indicator may therefore make decisions that protect one biodiversity value while damaging another.” The study is published in Cleaner Production (DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2026.149032).
The study lands six days before the opening of the United Nations Biodiversity Conference — CBD COP17 — in Yerevan, Armenia, which is set to begin October 19 and run through October 30. The full CBD COP17 agenda covers the first global review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. At that same gathering, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) is expected to release its landmark Exposure Draft on nature-related financial disclosures — the first globally coordinated nature reporting standard to be developed by the body responsible for IFRS. The ISSB July 2026 board decision confirmed all 12 members granted permission to ballot the exposure draft, with a 120-day public comment period to follow. When that draft arrives, companies around the world will face pressure to begin measuring their biodiversity impact. The Lund researchers’ warning is timely: more measurement, without the right methodology, is not better than no measurement.
What Biodiversity Actually Is — and Why One Number Cannot Capture It
Biodiversity is not a single thing. The formal UN Convention on Biological Diversity definition describes it as “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part” — encompassing diversity within species (genetic diversity), between species (species diversity), and across habitats (ecosystem diversity). These are not interchangeable dimensions. A forest with thousands of tree species has high species richness. A forest where none of those species are at risk of extinction has low threatened-species importance. A forest that is ancient, intact, and little disturbed by humans has high ecosystem integrity. These three facts can all be simultaneously true of the same patch of ground — or they can diverge radically. An area might be highly intact but species-poor; or species-rich but dominated by invasive, non-threatened taxa; or harbor critically endangered specialists even in a heavily degraded secondary habitat.
That multidimensionality is not a niche scientific subtlety. It was formally documented in the ecology literature as early as 1997, when Giulio De Leo and Simon Levin published a paper arguing that ecosystem integrity requires multiple measurement levels — that its measure “cannot be expressed through a single indicator, but rather requires a set of indicators at different spatial, temporal, and hierarchical levels of ecosystem organization.” The Lund study’s contribution is to demonstrate, at corporate scale and across 846 terrestrial ecoregions, how badly this matters in practice.
When Indicators Disagree: The Boreal Forest Problem
The research team — working as part of Sweden’s Mistra BIOPATH program, which received 50 million Swedish kronor renewed (approximately $5 million) in 2026 for another four years of work — compared four biodiversity indicators simultaneously: two measuring ecosystem integrity (how intact and undisturbed a habitat is relative to its pre-industrial state), one tracking threatened species, and one measuring species richness (total species count in an area). They mapped all four across 846 ecoregions worldwide and compared how they agreed or diverged, region by region.
The correlations were often weak, and in several cases negative.
Boreal forests illustrate the problem with precision. When the team compared primary forests (old-growth, intact, minimally disturbed) with secondary forests (younger, previously logged, regenerating) in boreal ecoregions, ecosystem integrity indicators rated primary forests as more ecologically valuable. But threatened species and species richness indicators rated secondary forests higher. That divergence means a forestry company using only an ecosystem integrity metric might correctly protect primary boreal forest — while inadvertently exposing secondary boreal forest to harm, even though that secondary forest may harbor threatened species the integrity indicator never registered. A company using species richness alone might look past the boreal entirely, since species richness tends to peak in tropical zones regardless of forest condition.
The mathematical reason for this divergence runs through the indicator designs themselves. Ecosystem integrity aggregates signals of human disturbance — deforestation, fragmentation, infrastructure encroachment — into a landscape-level score. It is not designed to detect which specific organisms live there. Threatened species indicators weight areas by their concentration of IUCN Red List taxa: a species-poor bog dominated by two or three critically endangered specialists will score higher here than a species-rich but ecologically common forest. Species richness counts total taxa regardless of their vulnerability or the habitat’s condition. None of these is “wrong.” Each captures a real and important dimension of biodiversity. But each is also capturing a dimension the others do not, and combining them by using only one is the equivalent of measuring the temperature of a room to assess its safety and ignoring the presence of combustible gases.
“If companies want to understand and report their impact on biodiversity accurately, they need to use several indicators rather than a single measure,” Sidemo Holm said. “Indicators can play a crucial role in informing decisions that affect biodiversity, but there is still considerable room for improvement in how they are used today.”
Why Is Biodiversity Reporting Rising — and Why That Could Make Things Worse?
In 2025, corporate biodiversity disclosure began to move for the first time in detectable numbers. Among the companies the Lund team studied, 18% of 2025 sustainability reports included at least one biodiversity indicator, compared to just 4% in 2024 and zero in 2023. That uptick tracks directly with regulatory pressure. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) — which affects close to 50,000 companies across Europe — includes mandatory biodiversity disclosure requirements under ESRS E4, and explicitly incorporates guidance from the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework. The GRI 101 Biodiversity Standard entered into force on January 1, 2026. And the ISSB is preparing to release its own nature disclosure Exposure Draft at COP17.
The Lund study’s finding introduces a cautionary note that should reach every compliance officer preparing for this wave: the emerging regulatory frameworks do not yet specify how many indicators companies must use, or require multi-indicator approaches. The ISSB Practice Statement approach, which is voluntary, draws on the TNFD framework, which in turn permits companies to use whichever metrics are relevant to their context. A company could, in principle, select a single ecosystem integrity metric, apply it consistently, and satisfy the letter of every forthcoming disclosure requirement — while generating conclusions that the Lund study shows are structurally guaranteed to miss threatened species or species richness implications.
That risk is not hypothetical. The IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment — published in February 2026, produced by 79 experts from 35 countries and approved by more than 150 member governments — found that global finance flows of more than $7.3 trillion had direct negative impacts on nature in 2023. The assessment’s co-chair, Stephen Polasky, called biodiversity loss “one of the most serious threats to business.” The assessment also documented what it called a structural problem: current corporate reporting practices “do not support” efforts to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, partly because relevant information never reaches the decision-making level where it could change behavior.
Meanwhile, according to risk data firm RepRisk, biodiversity-related greenwashing incidents nearly doubled through June 2026 compared to the prior reporting period — reaching 300 incidents versus 162 in 2024. Biodiversity-related greenwashing overtook climate greenwashing for the first time.
How Wrongly Measured Biodiversity Gets Companies Into Trouble: The 33 Ecoregions at Greatest Risk
The study goes beyond methodology to identify exactly where the consequences of single-indicator approaches are most severe. The researchers overlaid their indicator comparison maps with projections of where habitat loss is expected to be most severe by 2050.
The numbers are arresting. Approximately 3% of global land faces high rates of habitat loss from agricultural expansion by mid-century, 5% from primary forest harvesting, and 0.5% from urban development. The study identified 33 of the world’s 846 terrestrial ecoregions where more than half of the combined biodiversity value measured by all four indicators is concentrated in areas projected to face high habitat loss. In 10 of those ecoregions, that concentration rises to at least 80%.
These high-risk ecoregions are predominantly tropical — precisely the regions from which food, apparel, and commodity companies source the agricultural products that drive the majority of deforestation. They are also the regions where the disagreement between individual biodiversity indicators is sharpest. That means companies with tropical supply chains who choose a single indicator are not only making methodologically incomplete assessments; they are making them in the places where the methodological gap produces the largest errors.
Why Do Single Indicators Fail? A Three-Minute Technical Explainer
The failure mode is built into the mathematics of dimensional reduction. Biodiversity has three non-interchangeable dimensions: genetic, species, and ecosystem. Each dimension contains information about living systems that the others do not. When a company selects one indicator to represent biodiversity in its decision-making, it is performing a form of dimensional reduction — collapsing a multi-dimensional variable into a single number. That process always discards information. The question is only how much information, and which dimensions are lost.
Ecosystem integrity indicators measure landscape-level human disturbance — deforestation rates, road density, agricultural footprint relative to historical conditions. They are well-suited to identifying intact habitats and tracking their degradation over time. They are not designed to detect which specific species live in those habitats, whether those species are threatened with extinction, or how many of them there are. A company using only ecosystem integrity could protect a highly intact forest that happens to harbor no threatened species while failing to protect a heavily logged secondary forest that shelters a colony of critically endangered primates.
Threatened species indicators weight geographic areas by the concentration of IUCN Red List taxa. They are sensitive to the specific distributions of animals, plants, and fungi that face documented extinction risk. They are not designed to measure the degree of human disturbance in a landscape, or its total species count. A company using only threatened species indicators might concentrate its conservation investment in areas with high extinction-risk taxa while ignoring the systematic degradation of intact but species-poor ecosystems.
Species richness indicators count the total number of species in an area. This makes them sensitive to biogeographic history — tropical regions typically have the highest species richness regardless of human disturbance, because evolutionary history has been concentrating species in those zones for millions of years. A company using species richness alone will tend to focus on the tropics and find it difficult to justify protecting temperate or boreal ecosystems where richness is lower but irreplaceable ecological functions may be concentrated.
Each indicator is scientifically valid within its own frame. Their correlations across the world’s 846 ecoregions are often weak, and in some cases negative, because they are designed to capture different things. Using only one is not a reasonable approximation of biodiversity impact. It is a measurement of one dimension that actively excludes the others.
What the Research Team Recommends
The researchers offered seven specific recommendations for how companies, regulators, and standard-setters should structure biodiversity measurement going forward:
Use multiple biodiversity indicators to capture different aspects of biodiversity and avoid overlooking important values. Use more than one indicator per biodiversity dimension where possible, reducing bias from specific datasets or methodologies. Treat composite indicators — which average several metrics into a single score — cautiously, as a screening tool only; rely on individual indicators for consequential decisions, since composites can mask trade-offs between dimensions. Assess biodiversity at the ecoregion level, not only globally, to identify important biodiversity values in less species-rich ecosystems that global averages obscure. Develop new indicators for underrepresented dimensions, particularly genetic diversity and ecological connectivity. Improve taxonomic coverage, especially for plants, fungi, and invertebrates — all currently underrepresented in biodiversity datasets. And combine biodiversity indicators with assessments of future human pressures, such as projected land-use change by 2050, to make measurement forward-looking rather than merely descriptive.
The Regulatory Window Still Has Time — and That Is the Point
The arrival of the ISSB Exposure Draft at COP17 is not the end of the standards process. After publication, the confirmed 120-day comment period will follow. That comment window is precisely when requirements for multi-indicator approaches could be written into the standard before it is finalized. The Lund researchers’ seven-point framework is, in effect, a submission-ready roadmap for what those requirements should contain.
The Finance for Biodiversity Foundation open letter, co-signed by WWF and Conservation International, urged the ISSB to adopt a mandatory standard rather than its current voluntary Practice Statement approach. Whether or not that argument prevails, the comment period gives investor groups, conservation organizations, and ESG-focused companies direct input into whether the standard requires multi-indicator rigor or permits the single-indicator compliance gap the Lund study documents.
“If companies want to understand and report their impact on biodiversity accurately,” Sidemo Holm concluded, “they need to use several indicators rather than a single measure.”
The opportunity to build that requirement into global disclosure standards opens in six days.
Currency conversions in this article are approximate, based on exchange rates as of October 13, 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can’t companies just use one biodiversity indicator and call it done?
Biodiversity has three distinct dimensions — genetic diversity (variation within species), species diversity (the variety of organisms present), and ecosystem diversity (the variety of habitats) — and no single number captures all three. Different indicators are built to measure different dimensions. An ecosystem integrity score tells you how undisturbed a landscape is relative to historical conditions. A threatened species indicator tells you where IUCN Red List taxa are concentrated. A species richness metric counts total species. These measurements often diverge significantly: a highly intact boreal forest scores well on integrity but poorly on species richness. A logged secondary forest with a few critically endangered specialists scores high on threatened species but low on integrity. A company that selects one metric is discarding the information the others would provide — including, potentially, the information most relevant to the specific decision it is making.
What does the ISSB Exposure Draft mean for companies globally?
The International Sustainability Standards Board is expected to release its first nature-related disclosure Exposure Draft at the CBD COP17 conference in Yerevan, Armenia, beginning October 19. The ISSB July 2026 board meeting confirmed all 12 members granted permission to ballot the draft, with a 120-day public comment period to follow. The draft will build on the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework and will sit alongside existing IFRS S1 and S2 sustainability disclosure standards. ISSB Chair Emmanuel Faber has said that material nature-related disclosures are already required under existing IFRS S1 rules — meaning companies cannot wait for the new standard to begin reporting.
What are the practical steps a company should take to avoid the single-indicator trap?
The Lund University research team offered seven concrete recommendations. The most actionable for compliance teams preparing CSRD, TNFD, or ISSB disclosures are: use at least two indicators from different biodiversity dimensions (not two ecosystem integrity scores); perform assessments at the ecoregion level rather than country-level or global averages; treat composite indicators (single-score indices that average multiple metrics) as screening tools only, not as the basis for material disclosure; and incorporate projections of future land-use change — agricultural expansion, forest harvesting — into assessments so that high-risk supply-chain sourcing regions are identified before harm occurs rather than after.
How much financial value is at stake in the biodiversity measurement gap?
According to the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment, published in February 2026 and approved by more than 150 member governments, global finance flows of more than $7.3 trillion per year had direct negative impacts on nature as of 2023. An independent academic study estimated that $7.2 trillion in total enterprise value across the world’s largest publicly listed companies was exposed to unmanaged biodiversity risk as of 2018 (Carvalho et al., Business Strategy and the Environment, 2023). The decline of natural ecosystems has been estimated to cost the global economy approximately $5 trillion annually in lost natural services. Companies that misidentify low-risk regions using single indicators, and whose supply chains subsequently contribute to habitat loss in those regions, face growing exposure to greenwashing enforcement actions — biodiversity-related greenwashing incidents nearly doubled in 2026 compared to 2024 — as well as to supply-chain disruption from the ecosystem service losses their own measurement failures helped obscure.
The study, “Biodiversity at risk when businesses rely on narrow indicators,” was published October 8, 2026, in the Journal of Cleaner Production (DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2026.149032). The lead researcher is William Sidemo Holm, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lund University.