The Evolving Role of Finance in Environmental Strategy: Integrating Climate, Sustainable, and Biodiversity Finance

ABSTRACT The literature on climate finance, sustainable finance, and biodiversity finance has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, yet it remains conceptually fragmented and often organized around specific mechanisms, risks, or policy initiatives. This paper provides a systematic and integrative review of this evolving field by combining bibliometric, thematic, and qualitative analyses of 1228 peer‐reviewed articles published between 2007 and 2025. The results document a progressive broadening of research focus, from climate‐related risk pricing and disclosure, to firm‐level sustainability strategies, and more recently to natural capital and ecosystem‐oriented financial mechanisms. Building on these patterns, the paper introduces the strategic integration pathway of Climate, Sustainable, and Biodiversity Finance (CSBF), a conceptual framework that organizes the literature around three dominant and coexisting logics of financial–managerial engagement: defensive, strategic, and regenerative. Rather than treating these domains as sequential stages or isolated subfields, the framework highlights increasing depth of integration between finance, management, and environmental systems. By clarifying how the role of finance evolves under tightening ecological constraints, the study contributes to theory development in sustainable finance and provides a structured foundation for future research, managerial decision‐making, and policy design.