Businesses are striving to address their impacts on the environment and enhance their sustainability, but many find biodiversity daunting to deal with. Numerous indicators and metrics have been designed for businesses to measure corporate-level biodiversity performance, but none covers all types of business operations in all biomes. To address these challenges, in March 2021 IUCN published Guidelines for Planning and Monitoring Corporate Biodiversity Performance (P.J. Stephenson & G. Carbone, 2021, dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.CH.2021.05.en). The guidelines take lessons learnt from conservation science, practice and project management and translate them into a business context.

The guidelines propose a four-stage approach to develop a corporate-level biodiversity strategic plan: (1) identifying priority pressures and dependencies across company operations and supply chains, and the most important species, habitats and ecosystem services to protect; (2) defining company ambitions through a vision, goals, objectives and strategies; (3) choosing scalable, linked indicators to monitor delivery of company ambitions; and (4) implementing strategies, collecting data against a monitoring plan, and using and sharing data to facilitate adaptive management.

A key element is the pressure–state–response–benefit indicator model, which has become central to biodiversity monitoring for conservation projects and the Sustainable Development Goals. This model allows companies to measure progress along their theories of change and to demonstrate how their actions lead to outcomes and impacts. A unique feature of the IUCN approach is that it encourages companies to name the species, habitats and ecosystem services they will focus on, a level of specificity that will ultimately enhance the feasibility and measurability of their ambitions and the quality of their monitoring. The guidelines also act as a toolkit by explaining how existing business guidelines, standards and tools can be applied in the different stages of developing and implementing a corporate-level biodiversity strategic plan.

This work was a unique collaboration between the IUCN Species Survival Commission Species Monitoring Specialist Group, the IUCN Global Business and Biodiversity Programme, and companies from various sectors, especially Alcoa, Boskalis and Nespresso, who helped test and shape the guidelines. IUCN now encourages other companies to work with it to roll out and further test the guidelines. It is hoped this simple, stepwise process will encourage more companies to engage with nature and to see that doing so is less daunting than they thought.