The stakes could hardly be higher. Scientists warn that the planet is entering a sixth mass extinction, with as many as one million species at risk of disappearing by the end of the century, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Corporate operations are deeply implicated in this crisis: land-use change, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution, and invasive alien species—the five principal drivers of biodiversity loss identified by IPBES—are all closely tied to business activity. Yet the relationship runs in both directions. The World Economic Forum and PwC estimate that more than half of global GDP, roughly 44 trillion dollars annually, is moderately or highly dependent on natural capital. When pollinating insects decline, coffee and cocoa supplies falter; when ecosystems degrade, the services that underpin entire industries erode with them.

It was against this backdrop that the TNFD emerged. Conceived at the World Economic Forum in Davos and formally established in 2019 with support from organizations including the United Nations Environment Programme, the taskforce released its first set of disclosure recommendations in September 2023. What distinguishes the TNFD from earlier frameworks is its dual emphasis. Companies are asked to report not only their impacts on nature—changes in the state of ecosystems caused by their activities—but also their dependencies: the environmental assets and ecosystem services they rely upon to operate. Earlier initiatives such as the Natural Capital Protocol had introduced these concepts, but corporate biodiversity assessments historically fixated on impacts, leaving dependency largely unexamined.

Nakao and Kohsaka set out to determine whether the TNFD’s conceptual shift had actually changed which companies disclose biodiversity information, and how well. Rather than sampling the largest firms by market capitalization, as many previous studies had done, they focused on 228 companies registered as TNFD adopters as of May 2024, excluding the financial sector. These firms, spread across ten industry groups and dozens of countries—Japan alone accounted for 73 of them—had publicly committed to aligning their disclosures with TNFD recommendations. The researchers then compared the same firms’ biodiversity reporting in 2019, before the TNFD framework existed, and in 2023, after its release.

To measure disclosure quality, the team built a new instrument called the Biodiversity Disclosure Performance Index, or BDPI. Structured around three dimensions—Assessment, Practice, and Target—the index scores companies on ten items, each rated from 0 to 3. Crucially, the index incorporates two cross-cutting criteria drawn directly from the TNFD worldview: whether a firm addresses both impacts and dependencies, and whether its analysis spans the entire value chain rather than just direct operations. Scoring was performed through manual content analysis of integrated reports, sustainability reports, and other formal documents, using nine keywords derived from the TNFD Glossary, because the authors judged that even advanced automated tools could not yet reliably extract contextually accurate information from complex corporate reports.

The results were striking. The mean BDPI score rose from 10.44 in 2019 to 14.49 in 2023, signaling broad improvement. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests showed statistically significant gains in seven of ten sectors, including Food and Beverage, Health Care, Infrastructure, Services, Technology and Communications, and Transportation, with no significant change in consumer goods, extractives, or resource transformation. Regionally, median scores rose significantly in Asia, Europe, and North America. Variance increased in Technology and Communications and Transportation, suggesting firms within those sectors are diverging in their reporting progress rather than converging.

The most provocative finding, however, came from the regression analysis. Using ordinary least squares models with the BDPI as the dependent variable, the researchers tested whether a firm’s impact on nature and its dependency on nature—both measured using ENCORE scores, a tool maintained by Global Canopy, UNEP FI, and UNEP-WCMC that rates industries across 12 impact drivers and 21 ecosystem services—explained disclosure quality. In 2019, the impact score was a statistically significant positive predictor, consistent with the long-standing view that environmentally intensive firms disclose more to legitimize their operations. By 2023, that significance had vanished. In its place, the dependency score emerged as a significant predictor at the one percent level. Firm size, measured by log-transformed employee numbers, remained significant in both years, but no other control variable—profitability, listing status, TCFD adoption, or business type—showed a consistent effect. A robustness check with reweighted index scores confirmed the pattern.

Why would companies voluntarily advertise their vulnerability to nature? The authors offer a three-part explanation. First, investors are expanding their attention beyond environmental harm to the physical and supply-chain risks that arise when businesses depend on degrading ecosystems, a shift documented in studies of institutional investor behavior. Second, competitive dynamics are at play: as TNFD adopters within an industry establish new reporting benchmarks, peers feel pressure to keep pace, and the sectors with the most adopters showed the largest disclosure gains. Third, and perhaps most interesting, is an internal reorientation. Under the Natural Resource-Based View of the firm, the ability to manage rare and vulnerable natural resources can itself become a source of competitive advantage, giving highly dependent firms an intrinsic incentive to measure and communicate their nature-related risk management.

The researchers interpret this shift through the lens of signaling theory. In Spence’s classic framework, firms with superior attributes send costly signals that weaker firms cannot credibly imitate. Assessing and disclosing biodiversity dependencies is genuinely expensive—it demands data collection across value chains and carries reputational risk from exposing vulnerabilities. Yet by doing so, dependency-intensive firms signal to capital markets that they understand and can manage the natural-capital risks that increasingly matter financially. The content of the signal, the authors argue, is changing: from demonstrating low environmental impact to demonstrating the capability to identify and disclose financially material dependencies in a decision-useful way. Legitimacy, in this reading, is being redefined—from proving that a firm harms nature less, to proving that a firm comprehends the natural foundations of its own business continuity.

The study has clear limitations. Its sample consists entirely of early adopters, a self-selected group of frontrunners that may be unusually capable and motivated; whether dependency will predict disclosure quality as reporting diffuses through the wider economy remains an open question. The keyword-based retrieval process may have missed biodiversity content expressed in unconventional terms, and the ENCORE-based scores capture sectoral patterns rather than the specific scale and location of individual firms’ activities. Still, the implications are considerable. If dependency is becoming a genuine driver of corporate transparency, then biodiversity reporting may be evolving from a defensive exercise in reputation management into a strategic instrument for communicating resilience—one in which the firms most exposed to nature’s decline are, paradoxically, the ones most willing to say so out loud.

Subject of Research: Determinants of corporate biodiversity disclosure quality among TNFD adopter firms before and after the TNFD framework

Article Title: Shifting from impact to Dependency?: Determinants of corporate biodiversity reporting among TNFD adopter firms

Article References: Nakao, K., & Kohsaka, R. (2026). Shifting from impact to Dependency?: Determinants of corporate biodiversity reporting among TNFD adopter firms. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101567. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101567

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: biodiversity disclosure, TNFD, corporate reporting, natural capital, ecosystem services, ENCORE, signaling theory, sustainability reporting, nature-related risk, Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, regression analysis, firm dependency

The research, led by Ángela Martín-Méndez of the Universidad Europea de Madrid together with Francisco Campuzano-Bolarín of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena and David López-López of ESADE Business School, is built on a structured critical review spanning six connected literatures: nature-positive itself, net-based approaches such as no net loss and biodiversity net gain, the mitigation hierarchy and offsetting, biodiversity measurement and reporting, environmental management systems, and the realities of implementation in industrial firms and small and medium-sized enterprises. Rather than running a conventional meta-analysis, which the authors say is impossible in a field lacking a common outcome variable or unit of analysis, they coded each source against a common set of analytical questions covering definitions, netting logic, controllability, measurement, governance and reporting.

The review’s central finding is that nature-positive is used in radically unstable ways. In its strongest and most cited sense, it describes a societal ambition to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and move towards ecological recovery, a directional goal championed by figures such as Harvey Locke and E.J. Milner-Gulland. But the same term is routinely deployed as a corporate commitment, a project-level outcome or a vague rhetorical signal of green intent. Critics including Milner-Gulland and, more recently, Thomas White and colleagues have warned that the concept loses analytical meaning when applied without clear specification of scale, baseline, evidence standard and governance. For a bounded operational site embedded in a wider landscape, the authors argue, this ambiguity is especially corrosive: it invites either unverifiable net-outcome claims or empty slogans.

The second tension the review uncovers lies in the netting logic inherited from no net loss, net positive impact and biodiversity net gain approaches. These frameworks promise a familiar performance arithmetic: establish a baseline, quantify losses and gains, report a net result. Yet decades of scholarship, from John Bull’s foundational work on offsets to Maron and colleagues’ 2024 warning that nature-positive must incorporate rather than undermine the mitigation hierarchy, keep circling the same unresolved problems of equivalence, additionality, timing, permanence and governance. Gains created through compensation may not genuinely match losses elsewhere; some gains would have happened anyway; restoration lags far behind impact; and long-term maintenance is hostage to changing ownership and budgets. For industrial facilities, the authors conclude, compensation provides a fragile basis for claims of positive biodiversity performance, and the evidence more strongly supports on-site avoidance, pressure reduction and continuity of management.

The third tension is perhaps the most practically important: controllability. Facility managers can directly alter mowing regimes, planting structure, drainage patterns, lighting, herbicide use and contractor specifications, and these interventions can meaningfully improve habitat quality within the site perimeter. What they cannot do is fully control species occurrence, abundance or persistence, which depend on landscape connectivity, source populations, climatic variation and ecological time lags that stop at no fence line. Improved habitat may be necessary for biodiversity recovery without being sufficient to guarantee it. This asymmetry, the authors argue, should reshape accountability: managers can be held responsible for actions that are implemented, maintained and governed, but not for every ecological response over long horizons. Ecological observations, on this view, are directional learning signals rather than deterministic performance scores.

Measurement compounds the difficulty. Biodiversity is multidimensional, encompassing habitats, species, ecological functions and relationships, and any single metric captures only selected slices of ecological change. Studies by Nicholson, Martínez-Jauregui, Simpson and Wauchope all show that different indicator choices lead to different ecological and managerial conclusions. Meanwhile the reporting literature, including Boiral’s influential work on biodiversity reporting and impression management, documents how disclosure under instruments such as TNFD and ESRS E4 remains fragmented, selective and vulnerable to overstatement. The review therefore endorses a two-layer evidence logic: a first layer of intervention evidence, recording what was implemented, where, when, by whom and with what maintenance provisions, and a second layer of ecological signal evidence, consisting of repeated habitat observations useful for learning but not to be presented as proof of net biodiversity outcomes.

From these findings the authors derive their framework, Nature-Positive for Industrial Facilities, or NP4IF. It is deliberately not a new biodiversity doctrine and does not replace TNFD, ESRS, science-based targets or biodiversity net gain requirements; its contribution is operational. NP4IF treats the facility perimeter as the unit of action, evidence, responsibility and claim, and links seven components: a site baseline, a prioritisation filter that selects interventions by ecological relevance, feasibility, safety, cost and persistence, an intervention portfolio covering measures such as vegetation management, drainage improvement, lighting attenuation and reduced chemical pressure, governance mechanisms that embed actions in routine operations, the two-layer evidence system, and a claims-discipline mechanism that aligns external communication with the strength of available evidence.

The framework runs on a PDCA-compatible cycle familiar from ISO 14001-style environmental management systems. In the Plan stage, a facility defines its perimeter, identifies ecological zones and constraints and selects a small set of feasible priorities. In the Do stage, interventions are implemented through standard operating procedures, maintenance routines, contractor requirements and training. The Check stage verifies intervention continuity and records ecological observations using proportionate indicators, while the Act stage corrects weaknesses, scales effective measures and discontinues ineffective ones. A six-point decision pathway then governs what can be claimed: strong claims are limited to actions that have been implemented, maintained, governed and verified, qualified claims may describe ecological signals or trends, and claims of demonstrated net biodiversity gain are to be avoided unless robust evidence exists for baseline, equivalence, additionality, permanence, attribution and governance.

Why does this matter beyond the technical literature? Because biodiversity actions at industrial sites are notoriously fragile, vulnerable to reversal through procurement changes, contractor drift, budget cuts and staff turnover. The EMS literature shows that environmental systems function either as symbolic commitments or as practical infrastructures depending on how deeply they penetrate everyday routines, audits and management review. The authors argue that credible stewardship is associated less with ambitious rhetoric than with mundane but durable mechanisms: site zoning, maintenance standards, contractor clauses, inspection schedules and periodic review. For small and medium-sized enterprises and legacy sites in particular, a limited but persistent stewardship system may be far more defensible than expansive claims unsupported by operational continuity.

The study is candid about its limits: it is structured and critical rather than fully systematic, and the literature it synthesises is weighted towards Anglophone and European debates. Future research priorities include longitudinal studies of which interventions endure changes in budgets and management attention, testing of small feasible indicator sets, empirical work on adoption pathways in SMEs, and scrutiny of whether external disclosure under TNFD and ESRS strengthens substantive stewardship or merely produces more sophisticated claims. But the central message is already clear and likely to reverberate through corporate sustainability departments: industrial facilities should stop claiming, in abstract net-outcome terms, that they are definitively nature-positive. A far more credible claim, the authors conclude, is that a facility has implemented, maintained, monitored and reviewed a structured biodiversity stewardship process within its perimeter, reporting ecological observations as signals rather than proof. Nature-positive, in other words, is best understood not as a label a site earns, but as a disciplined management practice it performs, locally, persistently and with appropriate humility about what the fence line can and cannot deliver.

Subject of Research: An environmental management framework for biodiversity stewardship at industrial facilities

Article Title: Nature-Positive for Industrial Facilities: An Environmental Management Framework for Biodiversity Stewardship

Article References: Martín-Méndez, Á., Campuzano-Bolarín, F., & López-López, D. (2026). Nature-Positive for Industrial Facilities: An Environmental Management Framework for Biodiversity Stewardship. Environmental Management, 76(9), Article 298. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02601-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02601-2

Keywords: nature-positive, biodiversity stewardship, industrial facilities, environmental management systems, mitigation hierarchy, biodiversity offsets, no net loss, biodiversity reporting, TNFD, ESRS, SMEs, PDCA