Biodiversity at risk when businesses rely on narrow indicators

Businesses are major drivers of biodiversity loss and face increasing pressure to assess and disclose risks to biodiversity from their activities. Yet it remains unclear which indicators businesses rely on to measure biodiversity, and whether these indicators represent biodiversity broadly enough to support robust decision-making. We reviewed which indicators Global Fortune 500 businesses in high-impact sectors have reported using and assessed how well these indicators represent biodiversity. As of 2025, only 9% of assessed businesses had reported using biodiversity indicators. Businesses that reported indicators rarely applied more than one simultaneously, and these indicators captured only a narrow scope of biodiversity. Spatial correlations among the indicators were often weak, and sometimes negative, indicating that decisions based on avoiding high-value areas for one indicator, such as ecosystem integrity measured by Mean Species Abundance (MSA), may still degrade areas important for another, such as threatened-species importance measured by the STAR metric. We further identified ecoregions where comprehensive biodiversity assessments are especially critical because high values of multiple indicators, most notably threatened-species importance, coincide with areas projected to undergo high habitat loss by 2050. In 33 of the world's 846 terrestrial ecoregions, more than half of the aggregated value of each assessed indicator was concentrated in such high-risk areas, rising to at least 80% in 10 ecoregions. Most of these ecoregions occur in the tropics, where agricultural expansion and deforestation are the primary drivers of projected habitat loss. Composites integrating multiple indicators can reduce the risk of overlooking important values, but applying multiple individual indicators in parallel remains the most robust way to retain information on each biodiversity aspect.