Where is biodiversity in ESG? Environmental, social and governance (ESG) assessments largely overlook biodiversity

Abstract

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing is gaining momentum among investors aiming to “do well while doing good”. Although biodiversity is vital to the E pillar of ESG and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) encourages business biodiversity disclosure, it remains unclear whether ESG assessments effectively capture biodiversity issues. Using the GBF as a reference, we compared its metrics with country-level E indicators and corporate-level ESG providers. The country-level E indicators left most GBF aspects unaddressed, including ecological restoration, species exploitation and invasive species. Many of them were instead captured by the corporate ESG providers, which performed better but still presented substantial gaps in coverage (the highest coverage was only 37 %) and a wide variability in coverage. These results highlight the inadequate consideration of biodiversity in ESG assessments, underscoring the need to incorporate relevant biodiversity indicators and to standardize biodiversity metrics based on the GBF if ESG is to really work for biodiversity.