By Esther Whieldon, Matt Macfarland, and Ha-Chau Ngo

Highlights

The share of companies publicly committed to protecting biodiversity has more than doubled, to 35% in 2025 from 14% in 2022, the year the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted, S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment data shows.

Few companies conduct biodiversity risk assessments, creating a gap between companies’ public stance in favor of protecting nature and their understanding of how their business impacts nature and relies on ecosystem services such as fresh water or soil quality.

Biodiversity commitments increasingly cover supply chains, where a company’s impact on local ecosystems is often greatest. However, risk assessments usually only cover a company’s direct operations, putting the likely source of damage to biodiversity in the blind spot.

Policymakers, negotiators and stakeholders from across business and science are gathering this month in Yerevan, Armenia to review the world’s progress toward halting and repairing nature and biodiversity loss at COP17, the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. COP17 will mark the first assessment of the implementation of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), in which 196 countries set 23 targets to address nature and biodiversity loss. The GBF’s “30x30” framework aims to preserve and protect 30% of global land, inland water and ocean marine and coastal areas, and restore 30% of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, by the year 2030.

Companies are key to meeting this goal because business activity is a major driver of land clearance and natural resource over-exploitation. The business case for protecting nature is also clear: Natural capital underpins much of the global economy, and 57% of the world’s largest companies have a significant dependence on nature and the ecosystem services it provides.

This paper assesses action the corporate world is taking to measure and address the damage it causes to nature. Data from Sustainable1 by S&P Global Energy Horizons shows that nature-related commitments have jumped sharply since the adoption of the GBF in 2022, but they remain the exception rather than the norm. While many companies have taken a public stance in favor of nature protection or have pledged to reduce their impact on nature, only a handful are taking concrete steps to assess how they depend on nature and how their operations impact it.

These findings are drawn from data collected in the S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA), an annual evaluation of the sustainability practices of more than 13,000 companies globally. The CSA captures more than 3,500 data points across nearly three dozen environmental, social, governance and economic topics. This analysis of the CSA’s nature-focused data includes 7,425 companies that were assessed in both the 2022 and 2025 research cycles. In this report, we explore:

  • Which sectors and regions have the strongest commitments to nature preservation

  • Corporate recognition of nature loss tied to their supply chains versus assessment of supply chain nature risk

  • Adoption of commitments to halt deforestation, one of the largest forms of nature degradation and an area under growing regulatory scrutiny.

Biodiversity commitments have more than doubled

The share of assessed companies globally with some form of public commitment to protect biodiversity has more than doubled, from 14% in 2022 to 35% in 2025. These commitments can take several forms, such as pledging to reduce operations’ impact on local ecosystems and undertaking on-site restoration; or implementing a risk assessment framework to prioritize the operations with the highest nature risk.

Latin America remains the global leader in corporate pledges to preserve nature, with 63% of assessed companies in 2025 — the only region where a majority of assessed firms have adopted biodiversity commitments. Latin American companies appear to recognize their role in protecting what is a uniquely important hotspot for global biodiversity; the region hosts about half of the world’s terrestrial species and includes globally important ecosystems such as the Amazon Rainforest, the Andes Mountains the Cerrado savanna and the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef.

The region’s stance on nature comes after two of its countries played leading roles in recent major environmental conferences. Colombia hosted the COP16 biodiversity conference in 2024, and Brazil hosted COP30, the UN’s global climate change conference in 2025, where nature and biodiversity’s role in addressing climate change was in the spotlight.

The sharpest rise in corporate attention to nature has been in Asia-Pacific, where the percentage of companies committed to addressing biodiversity more than tripled between 2022 and 2025. Commitment levels have also doubled in North America. However, these two regions continue to lag Europe, where the policy environment has encouraged corporate action. The EU’s Biodiversity Strategy put into place a set of legal protections similar to the GBF’s 30x30 goal, and in 2024, its Nature Restoration Regulation set out targets for restoring land, coastal and marine habitats and forest and agricultural ecosystems that EU member states must achieve.

On a sector basis, utilities and energy companies remain the most likely to have biodiversity commitments, followed by the materials and consumer staples sectors. The materials sector includes mining companies seeking natural resources in remote and often biodiverse parts of the world, while consumer staples includes agriculture — two sectors with particularly high land use. Almost half of assessed companies in these sectors now have some form of biodiversity commitment, up from one-fifth in 2022.

For companies that have made a public biodiversity commitment, the CSA requires them to specify whether their commitments include the following aspects:

  • Using a nature loss mitigation hierarchy, which prioritizes avoiding impacting nature at the onset whenever possible, then minimizing any impacts that cannot be avoided, then restoring degraded ecosystems. Under a typical mitigation hierarchy, a company should use offsets for nature impacts only as a last resort.

  • Engaging with stakeholders such as suppliers, the local community, nongovernmental organizations, scientists or other experts to develop local biodiversity strategies.

  • Avoiding sites containing critical biodiversity or habitats with vulnerable or endangered species. These sites may be nationally or legally protected areas, habitats or species; or sites recognized by the scientific community or international organizations.

  • Having a net positive impact (NPI) on nature, in which impacts on biodiversity across the value chain are stabilized by 2030 with the ultimate goal of net improvements by 2050. An NPI commitment is aligned with the GBF.

  • Reaching a state of no net loss (NNL), which is the point at which project-related impacts on biodiversity are balanced by measures to avoid and minimize the project’s impacts, undertake on-site restoration and offset significant residual impacts on an appropriate geographical scale (e.g., local, landscape-level, national or regional).

A review of the details of corporate biodiversity pledges shows that a majority of companies with commitments in 2025 said they apply a mitigation hierarchy (68%), which is a useful framework for guiding nature-related strategy. However, only a small share of companies committed to NPI (18%) or required their value chains to avoid KBAs (26%).

Biodiversity risk in supply chains

Alongside the overall rise in corporate biodiversity commitments, companies are increasingly recognizing that downstream suppliers may be the largest source of negative impact on nature and the operations most dependent on local ecosystems. Suppliers are covered in the biodiversity commitments of 916 companies, or 37% of those with commitments, in the 2025 CSA. That number is up from 152 companies, or 16% of those with commitments, in 2022.

To reverse nature loss throughout the value chain requires understanding the biodiversity impacts and dependencies that exist in a company’s direct operations and those of its suppliers through a nature risk assessment. This kind of assessment is a key part of Target 15 of the GBF, which calls on countries to take legal, administrative or policy measures that encourage companies to assess, disclose and reduce their biodiversity-related risks and impacts. Companies need to understand the specific harm their operations cause to local ecosystems (impacts), as well as what risks their business could face if essential ecosystem services such as fresh water, soil quality or flood and erosion protection are degraded (dependencies). Several frameworks for conducting nature risk assessments exist, such as the “Locate, Evaluate, Assess and Prepare” (LEAP) methodology developed by the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures.

Nature risk assessment is another element of corporate strategy included in the CSA. Only about a quarter (26%) of companies assess their biodiversity risks and dependencies, according to the 2025 CSA.

For large listed companies, nature risk and dependency exposure is often greatest somewhere along the value chain rather than at directly owned operations. For example, in the consumer staples sector — which includes food, beverage and agriculture — companies typically do not directly own the farms or aquaculture sites that form the foundation of their supply chains. However, agriculture is the largest human activity driving land use change and has the largest impact on nature. This makes applying nature risk and dependency assessment to the entire value chain just as important — if not more — as taking this approach to directly owned facilities and operations.

In the 2025 CSA, of the 1,801 companies that perform biodiversity risk assessments, nearly all (96%) examine their own operations, while less than half (41%) also consider areas adjacent to their operations. An even smaller share of companies assesses biodiversity risks and dependencies in their supply chains: 37% review upstream activities (suppliers) and 24% examine downstream activities (consumers).

In only three sectors — communication services, consumer staples and consumer discretionary — do a majority of the companies include upstream suppliers in their biodiversity risk assessments. Like the consumer staples sector, consumer discretionary includes companies that rely on agriculture such as apparel and textile companies. The communication services sector, which includes major tech and internet firms, relies on upstream suppliers for hardware and infrastructure that in turn rely on rare minerals and resources that may be extracted in remote, biodiverse areas. If not managed responsibly, mining can degrade habitats and harm biodiversity at a mining site itself as well as through road and railway development in nearby areas.

Rising expectations for corporate nature risk reporting among investors and maturing disclosure frameworks for doing so may push companies to pay more attention to nature, including impacts and dependencies across supply chains, in the coming years.

The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) of the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, which has produced widely adopted disclosure standards for sustainability and climate-related information, is expected to publish a draft “practice statement” on disclosing nature-related risks and opportunities under IFRS S1, one of two of its existing sustainability standards. A total of 46 jurisdictions around the world have adopted or are in the process of adopting the ISSB standards, and the ISSB’s nature-related practice statement could drive more companies to implement risk assessments to fulfill reporting requirements.

Deforestation and growing regulatory scrutiny

Preserving and restoring forests and their ecosystems is an integral part of achieving the GBF’s overarching targets, including the 30x30 goal and Target 10 of the framework, which calls for the sustainable management of agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries and forestry.

Forests host up to 80% of the world’s biodiversity, according to the 2026 State of the World’s Forests report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The FAO notes that although the rate of deforestation has slowed over the past 10 years compared with the 1990s and 2000s, it has not stopped: 10.9 million hectares of forest were lost per year from 2015 to 2025.

Corporate commitments to halting deforestation remain extremely rare globally. Only 12% of companies assessed in the 2025 CSA have publicly committed to stopping deforestation — which is still about double the level in the 2022 CSA (6%).

As with biodiversity commitments, Latin America is by far the leading region for corporate pledges on deforestation, with 32% of assessed companies in 2025, up from 21% in 2022. The share of European companies with these commitments has also risen, and Europe may be the region that sees more striking improvement in future years as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR)’s enforcement period begins in December 2026.

Under the EUDR, products sold in or exported from the EU that are derived from commodities known for causing forest loss, such as cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy and wood, must be free from deforestation. Large and medium-sized European companies will come under new pressure to certify that the supply chains behind their products have not contributed to deforestation, wherever their suppliers are located. CSA data shows that about three-quarters of European companies with deforestation commitments already include their supply chain in that commitment.

Of the companies with no-deforestation commitments, most (61%) aim to achieve no gross deforestation, meaning a commitment to end all deforestation caused by the commodities or services the companies produce, trade and/or sell. This level of commitment is stronger than one to no net deforestation, which allows forest losses to be offset with afforestation — meaning a company is not pledging to stop the deforestation it currently causes.

Many industries that rely heavily on lumber, wood pulp or other natural or agricultural commodities have a higher share of companies with no gross deforestation commitments, CSA data shows. These include paper products, household and personal products and food and beverage industries. Electric, water and gas utilities, which typically need to clear forests and other vegetation to install and maintain their energy and water infrastructure, had the highest shares of commitments to no net deforestation. In the US, for example, federal electric reliability standards require utilities and transmission owners to maintain a certain amount of clearance between trees and power lines to reduce the risk of wildfires and damage to lines. Requirements to remove vegetation help explain these industries’ higher rate of commitments to no net deforestation, in which afforestation elsewhere is intended to offset local losses.

Looking forward

Corporate attention to nature has gained significant momentum since the GBF was adopted, with commitments to biodiversity and halting deforestation doubling since 2022. The maturation of disclosure frameworks and stronger policymaking in some regions could push adoption of corporate commitments higher still.

The full picture is more complex, however. Among companies with nature-related commitments, few look beyond their own operations or conduct risk assessments, potentially leaving gaps in their strategies and exposing them to risk. Corporate engagement on nature issues is also expanding more in some regions and sectors than others.

These trends together point to a potential gap between increased corporate attention to biodiversity issues and broader actions companies can take to have a system-wide understanding of their nature-related risk exposure.