Business Resilience Through Biodiversity Monitoring and Adaptation

There is a key link between nature and business success – changes in international business performance are related to fluctuations in nature, such as climate change. According to a 2024 World Economic Forum (WEF) report, more than half of global GDP, ($44 trillion), is highly dependent on nature. 

Yet the instability of business performance in the context of nature is navigable. If a healthy, natural world drives success in the business world, tracking nature is a solution that must be explored. This is where biodiversity data is critical for global corporations. 

This article explores how biodiversity data solutions are the cornerstone of business success and how sustainability leaders, corporate individuals, and agricultural businesses use them in an ever-changing natural world.

 

Undetected Threats: The Nature Crisis is a Business Crisis

Nature is the foundation of a resilient business. In industries reliant on natural resources, like the food and beverage sector, textiles and sustainable finance, the biodiversity of the natural world is the catalyst for growth and long-term success.

When nature declines or experiences crises, core business operations become vulnerable to disruption. For a textile brand, a crisis like pollinator decline in a cotton-producing region directly disrupts its supply chain, compromising production and product quality.

Production becomes volatile, threatening raw material shortages and delays that compromise product quality—a critical risk for businesses. Financially, this ecological crisis translates to increased sourcing costs and revenue is directly at risk, while a lack of data on the issue leads to a higher cost of capital and loss of investor confidence. 

The consequences of ignoring nature’s crisis are now being quantified by financial markets and regulators alike. As investors increasingly integrate nature-related risks into their capital allocation, and as new global mandates (such as the CSRD) demand verifiable environmental disclosure, companies are discovering that a robust biodiversity strategy is no longer a peripheral concern but a fundamental requirement for securing their long-term resilience and profitability. 

Biodiversity loss is a direct cause of business vulnerability, demanding that it be treated as a core strategic concern for safeguarding the entire business model. So, what is the real connection between business performance and the natural world? The following factors demonstrate the extent of their interdependence.   

 

The Dependence of the Agricultural Industry on Soil Health

The resilience of the Agriculture sector is fundamentally reliant on healthy soils, thriving biodiversity and specific species. Earthworms, for example, contribute to 6.5% of global grain and 2.3% of legume production, according to a study by Steven J. Fonte and Colorado State University. They enhance soil health and agricultural productivity by aerating the soil and completing nutrient cycling processes. 

However, a decline in earthworm populations, often a result of habitat loss or pesticide use, creates a critical ecological shift with direct business implications. This biodiversity loss leads to:  

• Compacted soil
• Restricted root growth 
• Resulting in poor crop yields 

The consequences of poor crops cascade through the value chain, causing supply chain disruption, increased resource costs, and challenges in securing sustainable practices. Ultimately, the decline of the vital environmental assets translates directly into tangible financial challenges for the agricultural industry.

 

How Food Companies Rely on Pollinators

Businesses in the food industry are highly dependent upon pollinators, which play a critical role in crop reproduction. Over 75% of the world’s food crops, which contribute hundreds of billions of dollars annually to the global economy and 90% of the world’s flowering plants require pollinators such as bees, bats, and birds to thrive, according to UNAANSW.org.au. 

The pollination process is a critical natural dependency for key agricultural commodities like coffee, cocoa, and cotton – directly impacting the quality and quantity of these raw materials. 

This makes the health of pollinator populations a direct business concern. As pollinators decline due to habitat destruction and pesticide use, the risk of supply chain disruption, crop yield volatility, and increased sourcing costs becomes a material business threat. 

Climate change and the use of pesticides, for instance, have the following effects:

• Cause the bee population to decline
• Impact the pollination process 

For a food business, proactive biodiversity MRV (monitoring, reporting, and verification) and adaptive management are now the only way to safeguard against these risks and ensure long-term supply chain sustainability.

 

The Link Between Native Trees, Ecosystem Stability and Climate Resilience

Native trees and vegetation are directly linked to ecosystem stability, providing critical ecosystem services. They support biodiversity, act as natural carbon sinks, provide clean water, and mitigate the risks of landslides.

Climate change, alterations in temperature, and changes in precipitation place significant stress on native trees and vegetation, causing:

• Outbreaks of pests or disease
• A disruption of agricultural supply chains

When agricultural supply chains are disrupted, there are delays in production and delivery. Expensive alternative sourcing may be required, which leads to additional financial challenges and increased overall business risk.

 

Shifts in Strategy: Monitoring Biodiversity for Resilience

With site-specific, precise biodiversity monitoring, corporate and agricultural businesses navigate such crises with ease. A sophisticated biodiversity tracking platform offers a range of advantages, reveals ecological risks, and provides the benefits mentioned below:

Insights into Risks

A key challenge for corporations is that managing biodiversity data is complex, making it difficult to communicate potential risks to stakeholders. When ecological data lacks clarity, it becomes difficult to translate into actionable insights, impeding strategic decision-making.

Biodiversity monitoring gives corporations, financial institutions, and on-the-ground producers the foresight, insights, and nature risk assessment needed to monitor ecological threats and significantly simplify complex data. These insights include:

• Metrics on the state of biodiversity – These metrics act as early warning signals for ecosystem risks, providing key insights into environmental degradation and enabling pre-emptive action before costly damage occurs.
• Sustainability reporting – With comprehensive sustainability reports, corporations demonstrate to investors how their organisation handles biodiversity risks, building both investor confidence and customer trust.
• Nature analytics data visualisation – This makes complex scientific datasets easy to interpret and share with stakeholders, as ecological data is transformed into clear, visual, actionable intelligence.

 

Identifying Biodiversity Risks to build Business Resilience 

Supply chain resilience is at risk when nature-related risks, such as unhealthy soils or pollinator decline, begin to affect business operations. 

With biodiversity data, corporations seamlessly navigate a wealth of siloed data points that reveal biodiversity risks and vulnerabilities before they escalate. To make informed business decisions, companies rely on location-specific biodiversity data to protect business operations  from the following challenges:

• Pollination Decline – Especially for businesses in the food and textile industries, the health of pollinator populations is a core operational concern. Pollination decline is directly linked to a number of business activities, such as pesticide use, lack of crop rotation and introduction of invasive species.    
• Invasive Species – The spread of invasive species is a major driver of biodiversity loss, and it poses a direct threat to business operations. From agricultural pests that reduce crop yields to organisms that damage infrastructure, invasive species have significant economic consequences.
• Soil Degradation and Loss of Fertility – The health of soil biodiversity is the foundation of a resilient agricultural supply chain. As a result of intensive farming practices and a lack of organic matter, soil ecosystems become degraded, losing their ability to cycle nutrients and retain water. This ecological degradation creates significant business risks, including increased fertilizer costs, reduced crop yields, and a loss of operational resilience against drought.

 

Proactive Environmental  Management for Risk Mitigation

For an agricultural business, proactive biodiversity restoration, or the act of aiding in the recovery of degraded ecosystems, is a vital component of resilience, safeguarding against costly damage and producing an improved crop yield. Handling these processes is challenging without specific ecological data.

With biodiversity data, restoring degraded ecosystems transforms into a proactive process, not a reactive one. Instead of waiting for visible signs of damage, successful organisations leverage field data to gather insights on declining species, empowering teams to take pre-emptive action or adjust operations before a more complex and costly restoration process is required. 

 

Biodiversity Data: Driving Resilient Business Models

Biodiversity data is a fundamental driver of resilient business processes. The link between such comprehensive data and adaptive business processes is seen in the examples below:

Data-Informed Regenerative Agriculture

Biodiversity data provides the insights needed for data-informed regenerative agriculture, allowing the agricultural industry to restore soil and biodiversity health while fostering ecosystem resilience.

Leveraging biodiversity data to track key indicators like microbial diversity, nutrient cycling, and soil structure enables data-informed regenerative agriculture. This helps optimise land use, which in turn contributes to better yields, a more successful business model and sustainable finance opportunities.

Targeted Restoration Efforts

Targeted restoration is a strategic approach that moves organisations beyond broad conservation goals to implement highly specific, data-informed actions. By leveraging scientific insights and precise ecological data, companies pinpoint degraded areas with the highest potential for recovery. 

This allows for a strategic focus on restoring critical habitats, enhancing ecological connectivity, and re-establishing native species in locations where it yields the most significant and measurable results. 

This approach not only maximizes the environmental impact and cost-effectiveness of restoration investments but also ensures corporation efforts are verifiable and aligned with nature-positive outcomes, providing crucial evidence for compliance and strengthening stakeholder trust.

 

Challenges Corporations Face with Biodiversity Data

While the need for robust biodiversity data is undeniable, corporations often face the challenge of actionable insights. The primary hurdle is data fragmentation: crucial ecological on-the-ground data is disconnected and presented in different formats. This leaves leaders and their teams without the comprehensive, strategic insights needed for effective risk management and credible sustainability reporting  

Consequently, corporations find it difficult to understand and translate complex ecological data into business-ready KPIs for frameworks like TNFD or CSRD. The complexities of verifying this data, connecting it to strategic business actions for stakeholders, and scaling these efforts across vast and complex supply chains are additional barriers that impede a company’s progress and leave it vulnerable to unmanaged risks.

NatureHelm: Leading the Way in Biodiversity Intelligence Platforms

The challenges of data fragmentation and its translation are not impossible; the biodiversity intelligence platform NatureHelm provides the solution. By aggregating and translating billions of biodiversity data points into meaningful business insights, NatureHelm helps corporations, financial institutions and producers on the ground to understand, prioritise, and manage business risks, impacts, and dependencies related to biodiversity.  

NatureHelm empowers businesses to solve the core challenges they are facing:

• Helps organisations overcome data fragmentation by aggregating diverse data types, bringing all the data points on the state of biodiversity in the context of business risks in a simple platform. 
• Translates complex ecological data into tangible business insights by offering biodiversity data insights and conveying nature analytics through sustainability reporting and data visualisation.
• Verifies data and helps to apply insights at any scale by offering a combination of data collection, data management features, meaningful insights, and science-based targets.

 

Empowering Businesses with Biodiversity Data from NatureHelm

Businesses depend on natural resources while their operations impact ecosystems. Understanding and integrating biodiversity data into corporate decision-making is therefore a strategic necessity. 

By providing site-specific biodiversity data, NatureHelm’s biodiversity platform gives corporations and financial institutions the strategic insights needed to understand their impact and nature-related dependencies.

If you are a global corporation seeking biodiversity data insights, screening, and sustainability reporting to make informed decisions, contact NatureHelm.