By Amelia Arreguin-Prado (CBD Women’s Caucus), Camila Cosse (Forest Stewardship Council) and Rosalind Helfand (PAJE Consulting)
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position or opinions of the CBD Women’s Caucus
About the event
The twelfth session of the Plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES-12) marked a significant milestone with the adoption of the IPBES Methodological Assessment Report on the Impact and Dependence of Business on Biodiversity and Nature’s Contributions to People, commonly referred to as the Business and Biodiversity Assessment.
Hosted by the Government of the United Kingdom in Manchester from 3–8 February 2026, the Plenary brought together over 150 IPBES Members, report authors, UN agencies, representatives of the private sector, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and observer organisations. While the full report was adopted, the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) was negotiated line-by-line by governments, reflecting the political importance of the findings for national and global biodiversity policy. The assessment examines how businesses both depend on and drive biodiversity loss, and identifies pathways for transforming business practices. Given that corporate activities and global value chains are among the major drivers of ecosystem degradation—while also holding significant potential to contribute to restoration—the policy relevance of this assessment is clear.
From a gender justice perspective, these debates are far from neutral. Corporate practices and global value chains have differentiated impacts on women and girls in all their diversity, including from Indigenous Peoples, and from local and Afro-descendant communities, affecting land rights, livelihoods, access to natural resources, and unpaid labour burdens. At the same time, women entrepreneurs and women-led enterprises across sectors are uniquely positioned to drive more sustainable practices and decision-making for nature and climate.
The way biodiversity risks are measured, reported and regulated therefore has direct implications for gender equality and human rights. Ensuring that business accountability frameworks integrate gender-responsive approaches, safeguards and diverse knowledge systems is essential for equitable and effective implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF)—particularly Target 15 on business disclosure and Target 23 on gender equality.
In this context, the CBD Women’s Caucus participated in IPBES-12 to help ensure that gender-responsive perspectives are reflected in discussions on business accountability and biodiversity governance. The Caucus also engaged with ONet, the body coordinating stakeholder participation in IPBES processes, contributing to dialogue among civil society actors and highlighting the importance of integrating gender equality, human rights considerations and community knowledge systems into emerging approaches to business and biodiversity.
Business and Biodiversity Assessment’s Gender Relevance: Gaps and Opportunities
The Assessment’s Summary for Policymakers (SPM) is an important communication tool for policy leaders, businesses and diverse stakeholders. Its Key Messages, Background Messages, tables and figures offer an easy to navigate overview of businesses dependencies on biodiversity, risks posed by corporate activities, the role of the financial sector and policy and regulatory recommendations. This is why the CBD Women’s Caucus hoped to see visibility of gender linkages in the SPM.
But while the SPM’s messages are deeply relevant for women and make broad reference to civil society, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities, women and gender are rarely explicitly discussed. This highlights the continuing need to ensure that processes for knowledge product development intentionally embed a gender and human rights lens from the outset. The Assessment chapters do acknowledge the impacts of business activities on women, the role of women as knowledge holders (especially Indigenous women) and the importance of gender equality for sustainable value chains, but these discussions are mostly absent from the SPM, as well.
Part of this gap may be attributed to insufficient gender-disaggregated data and research on topics related to business and biodiversity and on corporate practices. However, the Assessment and SPM appear more strongly focused on large corporate activity than small and medium-sized businesses, and also exhibit a lack of attention to unpaid care work, informal labor and women producers. Women farmers and discussion of issues such as risks of land dispossession are also not covered.
Despite these gaps, the SPM and Assessment still offer clear opportunities and pathways for businesses to align with gender-responsive approaches and Targets 15 and 23 of the KM-GBF. These pathways include discussion of leadership opportunities and guidance for actors, including civil society and local communities, to create an enabling environment for businesses to reduce their impacts on biodiversity. The Assessment and SPM also cover methodologies to assist businesses with decision making related to their impacts and dependencies on biodiversity, inclusive of participatory mapping and monitoring. Across decision making levels, the SPM further discusses the critical role of local stakeholder participation.
Such participatory opportunities intersect with gender-responsive approaches for implementing biodiversity targets and the CBD’s Gender Plan of Action. In practice, this should include corporate disclosures that integrate gender-responsive metrics, business risk frameworks that consider rights and social impacts and a focus on integrating the Gender Plan of Action’s principles in private sector engagement.
Outcomes and Next Steps
The Assessment’s launch comes at a critical juncture, underscoring the urgent need to reshape how businesses engage with biodiversity from both an ecological and gender justice perspective. The intersection of biodiversity and gender equality is not merely a side issue—it is central to ensuring that efforts to protect ecosystems do not reproduce or exacerbate existing inequalities. Transformative action is essential to dismantle systems of power that continue to exploit both nature and marginalized communities, particularly women.
Furthermore, transformative action is an opportunity for women’s economic leadership and recognition of the essential role of women entrepreneurs at every level in protecting biodiversity. Women can and are leaders in the world of business establishment, growth and success, and this is a key opportunity for supporting them in their endeavours.
One of the most pressing priorities is the integration of gender into business disclosure frameworks. Currently, corporate reporting often overlooks the gendered dimensions of environmental impacts, leaving women—who are disproportionately dependent on and responsible for natural resources—excluded from decision-making processes and impact measurements. By embedding gender-responsive indicators in corporate accountability structures, businesses can begin to recognise and address the unique risks to and contributions from women. This requires not just technical adjustments but a paradigm shift in how value is defined and measured, moving beyond profit-driven metrics to prioritize equity, sustainability, and visibilise fields dominated by women, such as care.
Equally important is ensuring that biodiversity finance does not shift risks onto communities, particularly those already vulnerable to displacement, land grabs, and exploitation. Market-based solutions such as carbon offsets or biodiversity credits often fail to account for the lived realities of Indigenous Peoples and rural women, who are often the (unrecognized) stewards of biodiversity and intergenerational knowledge. A gender-responsive approach demands that safeguards for land and resource rights be radically strengthened, centering the voices of those most affected by business operations. Without this, biodiversity finance risks reproducing colonial patterns of extraction and exclusion. Furthermore, women who are in business as small scale farmers need access to micro-finance and other business tools as well as support for decision making that enables local level implementation of the GBF.
The Assessment’s findings must also be a catalyst for rethinking corporate accountability. As governments and businesses work toward KM-GBF Target 15 implementation, they must integrate the IPBES insights into broader conversations about corporate responsibility. This includes aligning business policies with the Gender Plan of Action (GPA) under the CBD and ensuring that women’s organizations, grassroots movements and women business owners and entrepreneurs at all levels are fully included when shaping business policy and corporate accountability reforms. Dimensions such as the importance of participatory and community-driven approaches, recognizing that local knowledge, small women-owned businesses and care work are essential to sustainable biodiversity management, should be at the forefront of those processes.
Finally, the CBD Women’s Caucus, expresses a clear call to action for governments, businesses, and civil society to use the IPBES findings, inclusive of both the Summary for Policymakers and the assessment chapters, in the development and implementation of National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs). This is an opportunity to align biodiversity and business policies with transformative gender-responsiveness, ensuring that women’s rights and leadership are at the center of resource mobilization and private sector engagement. The path forward is not without challenges, but it is clear that the integration of gender justice into biodiversity policy and business practices is not optional—it is a necessity.