Published on 24 March 2025
Ryan Nolan – University of Exeter
Noel Morrin – University of Exeter
Business depends on nature for growth and resilience. Over half of global GDP – and around 5% of UK GDP by 2030 – is at risk if nature loss continues unchecked
As expectations from investors, policymakers and customers rise, companies that integrate nature and biodiversity into their strategy can strengthen supply chains, manage risk, reduce costs and unlock new opportunities.
RENEW is working to understand the barriers and enablers for business action on biodiversity, to better understand how to support action for biodiversity renewal within the corporate sphere.
Building on our research, we have created a practical guide for C-Suite executives to champion nature within their business.
The RENEW C-suite Guide provides practical insights to help leadership teams accelerate their journey toward nature-positive business. Underpinned by primary research with executives and senior leaders in the UK, the Guide identifies:
We engaged with major business and finance networks to understand how corporate decision-makers drive nature-positive change. Through collaboration with leading UK business and finance networks, this work identified and analysed the roles of influential actors within business settings, as well as the barriers they face.
We explored some of the key internal barriers identified in the literature, such as limited knowledge and expertise on biodiversity within firms, the difficulty of translating biodiversity into business-relevant metrics, and a lack of board-level engagement on the issue. At the same time, we focused on the enabling factors that support action, including leadership commitment, collaboration with scientific experts, emerging policy frameworks, and growing stakeholder expectations for nature-positive business models.
We combined this extensive review of academic and practitioner literature with in-depth interviews with key corporate decision-makers and solutions providers such as consultants and technology firms. Together, these methods provided actionable insights for enabling corporate biodiversity action.
Interviews confirmed many of the barriers identified in the literature, including a widespread hesitation to act due to uncertainty and lack of perfect data. This ‘perfection paralysis’ reflects a common view that biodiversity is too complex to address without crystal clear information, which in turn delays small but practical steps that could be taken now.This reinforces the need to uncover how organisations and nature champions can move forward with imperfect knowledge, and the tools or frameworks that can help overcome this barrier.
Towards Nature-Positive Business aims to help companies do exactly that, pinpointing critical enablers and practical steps to help companies overcome barriers and unlock faster, bolder action on biodiversity.
We hope business leaders will use the C-suite Guide as a springboard for further action within their own organisations. For researchers, it offers a sense of current challenges and avenues for future work. We hope the guide will catalyse collaborations between business networks, government agencies, investors, academia and NGOs to develop sector- and function-specific implementation guidance.
