Johan Olausson
Projektledare
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When nature becomes business-critical
Earlier this week I was in Edinburgh with the CircHive consortium. The EU Commission's representative called it "the ultimate phase of the project." After several years, we're finally starting to see the finish line.
You can feel it in the conversations.
Less talk about why biodiversity matters. More about how you actually do something with it.
How do you measure biodiversity? How do you make it useful for businesses, municipalities and investors? How do you go from frameworks to decisions?
It feels like a pretty good snapshot of where the nature agenda is right now.
Parts of sustainability legislation have slowed down or been pushed back — but the nature agenda keeps moving forward anyway. Not because compliance requirements are growing, but because relevance is.
More and more organisations are starting to realise this is about risk. What happens if water scarcity takes out a critical supplier. If harvests fail. If prices on key raw materials triple.
Cocoa is a good example. The price movements of recent years aren't just about market dynamics — they're about nature dependencies starting to produce real business impacts.
It's also highlighted in this year's IPBES report on business and biodiversity. The message is straightforward: biodiversity is a systemic issue for the economy, not just an environmental one. Almost every company both affects and depends on nature.
The problem is it's still hard to operationalise. There's no simple KPI. No method that works everywhere.
That's probably exactly why the work we do in CircHive feels relevant. Within Task 2.3, we're working on how indicators and measurement methods can better support real decisions — for different types of users, in different contexts.
Because the question is no longer whether nature becomes business-critical.
The question is how quickly organisations manage to do something about it.