4 things the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment got right

The IPBES report is explicit about which ecosystem services underpin business resilience most directly. Pollination services, soil functionality, and plant diversity figure prominently — as both dependencies that companies rely on and as areas where business impacts are most acute.

On pollination: the evidence is well-established but still underused in corporate risk assessment. Our bee monitoring provides a direct proxy for pollinator health and abundance, tracked annually, at the specific sites that matter to our clients. Decline in bee colony health or foraging range is an early signal of degrading ecosystem function, detectable years before it shows up in yield data.

On soil: the report highlights persistent gaps in soil biodiversity data at the business-relevant scale. Soil eDNA analysis is one of the few methods that addresses this directly, mapping microbial communities, fungal networks, and biological indicators of soil functionality from a simple core sample. It turns the most invisible part of the ecosystem into measurable, trackable data.

On plant diversity: pollen DNA extracted from our hives identifies the plant species bees visit across a wide radius, building a picture of landscape-level floral diversity that no transect walk or remote sensing tool can replicate at the same resolution. This matters for agrifood companies, water producers, extractive industries, and any sector whose operations sit within a living landscape.