Business and finance on a path towards meaningful biodiversity reporting?

Corporate biodiversity reporting is critical for assessing planetary health and meeting biodiversity targets, yet current frameworks and practices remain insufficient. This paper reviews 51 academic articles, along with additional policy and legal sources, and evaluates 30 biodiversity assessment tools to examine the state of biodiversity reporting. The analysis identifies three interlinked challenges of complexity, conceptualization, and governance. These challenges arise from gaps in knowledge, methods, and data, and are reinforced by the dominance of financial logics over ecological realities. Collectively, these challenges limit the reliability of reporting and the usefulness of existing tools for decision-making and risk mitigation. The paper concludes that meaningful biodiversity reporting requires closer integration of ecological knowledge and clearer alignment with the best available science. Important research and policy steps towards meaningful biodiversity reporting include establishing mandatory, standardized corporate disclosures of impact data linked to the five drivers of biodiversity loss, and stronger coordination across legal, accounting, and scientific domains on issues of materiality, risk, and valuation. • Biodiversity reporting is crucial for corporate sustainability and accountability. • Stronger scientific basis is vital for credible biodiversity impact reporting. • Complexity, conceptualization, and governance issues impact reporting and assurance. • Financial logics can limit biodiversity risk integration in reporting. • Legal, accounting, and scientific alignment strengthens biodiversity reporting.