How can businesses change their business model to support biodiversity?

Irish Times

15-05-2025

Planting trees and putting beehives on the roofs of commercial building are significant gestures to improving
biodiversity
but bigger efforts to change business models, supply chains and operational behaviour will be needed to halt the loss of biodiversity across the globe.
Three years ago Business for Biodiversity Ireland (BFBI) was founded with seed funding from the
National Parks & Wildlife Services
(NPWS) to help businesses recognise the impact they have on the natural world and start doing something about it.
In 2024 that organisation became a social enterprise with continued core funding from the NPWS. It now aims to get more businesses to develop transition plans to become nature positive and stewards of nature.
'It's about pushing nature at the board level. Biodiversity loss is happening at the same time as climate change. They are two sides of the one coin. Our society relies on a healthy, functioning natural world,' says Iseult Sheedy of BFBI.
READ MORE
She admits the task is a demanding one. 'We have been working from a place where businesses have very little understanding of how they interface with biodiversity to doing double materiality assessments to developing a nature strategy for the company.'
Double materiality assessments assess both the financial and the environmental/social impacts of business operations. Sheedy says that some businesses are starting to understand not only how their business impacts on nature but also their dependence on the natural world.
'There is a cohort of businesses – in the food and agricultural sector – which depend on nature, and unless they reinvest in nature positive actions their businesses won't survive,' says Emer Ni Dhúill, an ecologist who is head of research at BFBI. One example is how orchard owners rely on bees to pollinate apple flowers for a good apple harvest.
SAP Landscapes is one company which has become more aware of the wider context of nature in its work developing green infrastructure. 'We are seeing rising client interest in biodiversity and nature-based solutions,' says its commercial director Paul Giles. Using the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan as a guide the landscape company has begun to integrate wetlands into sites and increase native trees and shrubs in planting schemes.
'There is a three-stage process that businesses engage with. They do an assessment to understand their negative impact on the natural world. Then they take steps to avoid and minimise these impacts and then they invest in restoration and regeneration,' says Ní Dhúill.
Sheedy adds: 'We can't have an economy full of organisations built around profit only. We need mechanisms where reinvesting in nature happens.'
According to Sheedy, some businesses – in farming and food, construction and development sectors – have been thinking about these issues for a while, as have value-driven organisations who do voluntary reporting. 'But we'll eventually come to a tipping point where all businesses will have to engage,' she adds.
The change in language from corporate social responsibility to environmental social governance (ESG) within business has been a significant step in how companies perceive themselves and their wider commitments to society.
ESB Networks
was a founding member of the community of practice of BFBI. The State organisation published its biodiversity strategy, Networks for Nature, in September 2024. This policy statement outlines the company's commitments to environmental protection during the development, maintenance and operations of its infrastructure and assets.
The group is currently drawing on technical expertise on assessments, tool kits and metrics from BFBI to help it comply with new reporting regimes, including the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.
Those working in this space are, however, concerned that recent proposed delays to and simplifications of requirements for businesses to comply with the CSRD might slow down engagement from businesses in nature-positive strategies.
Announced by the European Commission in February, this so-called Omnibus package recommends postponing the application of the CSRD reporting requirements by two years for many companies which were due to report for the first time in 2026 for the 2025 financial year.
Furthermore the proposals recommend that the large companies which were required to prepare sustainability reports in 2025 for the financial year of 2024 are given longer period to do so and with less detail than previously requested.
Commenting on the announcement in February, Irish law firm McCann Fitzgerald said: 'The Omnibus proposals, if implemented, are hugely significant. The commission estimates that the number of companies in scope will be reduced by 80 per cent.'
Meanwhile, some universities have begun educating business students on the importance of biodiversity for business. Sheedy teaches organisational change for a sustainable future to second-year undergraduate students at the school of business in Trinity College Dublin.
'It's about understanding the political, economic and social reasons for the environmental crisis and a history around how business models were formed and need to change,' she says.
Assistant professor of business and nature Catherine Farrell, an ecologist, teaches fourth-year business students in Trinity College. 'The course looks at the innate value of nature, how businesses impact on and depend on nature, why businesses need to work with nature and the benefits of doing so.'
The students have shown an appetite for this learning, and as part of their final year research they work with businesses to map their nature positive actions. These businesses include A & L Goodbody; Chartered Accountants Ireland, Dundrum Shopping Centre and Hibernia Real Estate.
The timing of introducing these modules on the natural world into business schools coincides with the rise in nature-related disclosures within the business community such as the aforementioned CSRD.
Martha O'Hagan, the director of undergraduate programmes in the school of business at TCD, argues that it is essential to have ecologists teaching business students. 'Nature is critical infrastructure which provides clean water, clean air, flood mitigation and its damage is a very realistic risk for businesses.'
Farrell adds: 'There have been cases where businesses have invested in tree plantings that never happened in an unregulated unstandardised approach, which led to many instances of greenwashing.'
By teaching business students the importance of monitoring, reporting on and verifying inventions in nature, such greenwashing should be avoided in the future.
'They have to think seriously and understand what is the right thing to do. Finance that is misdirected is a lost opportunity for nature,' she says.
While there has been a lot of attention on climate targets, the global biodiversity framework 2022 nature positive targets for 2030 should give the natural world more traction, Farrell says.
'And the restoration of nature through rewetting peatlands, planting trees and regenerations seagrass in marine environments can all help achieve reductions of carbon-dioxide emissions.'
Trinity school of business has launched a pilot project to give corporates opportunities to directly fund nature initiatives on farms in Ireland. From September to December 2024, the
refarm.ie
project funded the building of 22 ponds on land owned by farmers in the Farming for Nature Network. Future projects will focus on improving depleted grasslands, putting in new hedgerows and woodlands.