Bringing Nature into business education: challenges and opportunities

Our economies depend on nature and yet we continue to invest in its destruction. More than 50% of the world’s GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services (World Economic Forum, 2020). Meanwhile, for every US dollar invested in protecting nature, around $30 flow towards activities that degrade it (UNEP, 2026). This imbalance reflects a deeper challenge: biodiversity – the variety of life on Earth, from diversity within species to entire ecosystems – is declining faster than at any point in human history (IPBES, 2019), putting livelihoods and economic stability increasingly at risk.

Changing this trajectory requires more than new regulations, business models or financial instruments. It also requires the people shaping decisions to understand nature's value and the consequences of their choices. This is why Sulitest is a proud partner of BIOFIN-EU (Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity Using Mainstream Finance), a project funded by the European Union, which aims to unlock and accelerate financial flows to protect and restore biodiversity through better alignment of regulation, business models, financial instruments, and the skills and mindsets of the people behind them.  

In 2025, we analysed TASK™ data, identifying that business students underperform in both Earth Systems and Levers of Opportunity subjects, with Biosphere Integrity receiving lower average scores than Climate Change. In this article, adapted from our publication within BIOFIN-EU, we turn our attention to the challenges and opportunities for biodiversity in finance education. While the scope is deliberately narrow the challenges and approaches discussed are relevant across business education more broadly.  

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Challenges

Despite growing pressure on business schools to deepen their sustainability curricula, public commitments have not always translated into meaningful change. A literature review by Russo et al. (2023) found that sustainability commitments often remain confined to student-led initiatives or a handful of elective courses, rather than being embedded in core curricula. This is a missed opportunity, as universities have a responsibility to prepare future professionals to understand the wider implications of their decisions.  

Bringing biodiversity into business education also faces challenges related to the maturity of the field itself:

• A relatively recent field of research: While climate-related financial risks have been addressed through frameworks such as the TCFD for over a decade, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), providing a framework for assessing nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities, was only launched in 2023.

• An immature evidence base: Compared to climate finance, biodiversity-related financial research is still relatively young. A systematic review of 103 studies found the field to remain theoretically fragmented and methodologically uneven (Dang et al., 2025). The limited volume of academic research makes it harder for educators to draw on an established body of literature.

• Measurement complexity: Unlike climate impacts, which can often be expressed through standardised units such as tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, biodiversity is multidimensional and context-dependent. This makes its impacts harder to measure, compare and ultimately teach.

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Opportunities

An emerging research agenda

Dang et al.'s (2025) systematic review mentioned above does not stop at documenting the literature gap; it concludes by articulating an explicit research agenda. New findings, datasets and frameworks can bring real-world questions into the classroom, allowing students to engage with knowledge as it evolves.

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From biodiversity risk to business relevance

Although the evidence base remains relatively small, research increasingly demonstrates how biodiversity loss connects to core business concerns:

• Firm value: Managing biodiversity risk exposure is associated with increased firm value ahead of major policy milestones (Kalhoro & Kyaw, 2024).

• Financial stability: Biodiversity risk is positively correlated with stock price crash risk, while robust governance mechanisms can mitigate these effects (Bassen et al., 2024).

• Corporate resilience: Proactive biodiversity reporting is associated with more resilient business responses and reduced reputational exposure (Treepongkaruna et al., 2024).

• Business performance: Biodiversity exposure is linked to declining profits, rising costs and weaker growth prospects in ecosystem-dependent sectors (Bach et al., 2025).

Biodiversity doesn’t only matter when its loss can be expressed in financial terms. The ecological case for addressing biodiversity loss is already compelling. But, this also creates a practical opportunity for educators: biodiversity need not become an entirely separate subject competing for space in an already crowded curriculum. Instead, it can enrich existing modules on risk, valuation, resilience, governance and strategy, connecting ecological challenges to business decisions.

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Curricular change: from adding content to rethinking how we teach

Interdisciplinarity

Biodiversity is inherently multidimensional: ecosystems impact and are impacted by firms, financial markets, supply chains, communities, etc. Understanding how nature is relevant to decision-making may require insights from Earth-system science alongside finance, accounting, economics, strategy, governance, and ethics. Colombo et al. (2024) argue that engaging with different knowledge systems can also help students understand the interdependence of environment, society, and business.  

Interdisciplinarity, however, does not mean requiring finance students to become ecologists. It means developing in them sufficient ecological literacy to sufficiently appreciate the biodiversity crisis and broader environmental challenges, as well as critique business decisions, metrics and to understand where those representations have limits. It also creates an opportunity for educators to collaborate with colleagues across their university institutions, including researchers and teachers in biology, environmental science, agriculture, as well as political science, economics, and related fields.

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Beyond electives

Within a slow-changing curriculum, environmental or transdisciplinary courses are often introduced as electives. However, Lee and Waddock (2021) argue that treating sustainability as an add-on rather than an integral part of the core discipline produces "silo thinking". Sheehan et al. (2022) observe that accounting students learning ESG in some courses may recognise its intrinsic value, but the traditional “business-as-usual” emphasis on shareholder value maximization in the rest of the curriculum produces graduates who struggle to advocate for meaningful ESG integration in their later corporate roles. For biodiversity to become part of professional action, it needs to appear within the courses through which students develop their foundational decision-making and reasoning.  

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From knowledge transfer to transformative learning

There is also an important pedagogical concern to consider. Colombo et al. (2024), in arguing for a more social–ecological approach to management learning and education, invite educators to create the conditions in which students are encouraged to question existing assumptions, engage with different ways of apprehending environmental problems, and learn through interaction with others and with real-world challenges. This points towards pedagogies that are critical, active, problem-focused, and reflective.  

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From principles to practice: the BIOFIN-EU Knowledge Accelerators

Within BIOFIN-EU, Sulitest led the development of Knowledge Accelerators, designed as accessible entry points for finance lecturers to anchor biodiversity within finance education.  

• A glossary establishes a shared foundational vocabulary and directs educators and learners towards key concepts and sources in biodiversity finance.  

• An interactive quiz provides an active way for learners to test their vocabulary, challenge existing assumptions, and prepare for a deeper discussion.  

• Curated learning resources, including videos, MOOCS, websites and platforms that can support both educators to source materials to integrate into their teaching and learners who desire to deepen their understanding of finance for biodiversity.  

• Case studies help move knowledge acquisition to application: connected to typical finance learning objectives, they enable biodiversity to be contextualised within the discipline and potentially assessed as a course component.  

BIOFIN-EU Knowledge Accelerators help foster in students basic biodiversity literacy which, at the very least, should manifest itself as both a deeper understanding of how business decisions degrade the natural world, and a greater personal and sectoral commitment to measure, track, and channel efforts in ways that halt and reverse nature loss. By building foundational vocabulary, encouraging active engagement, and applying established business concepts to biodiversity-related cases, they are designed to lower the barriers to bringing biodiversity into mainstream teaching, learning, and assessment.

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Biodiversity and Business Coffee Meeting: 20 November

Sulitest and BIOFIN-EU will contribute to the Green Business Forum organised by Copenhagen Business School (CBS) on the 20^th of November. In a hybrid “coffee meeting” session, Estela Castelli Florino Pilz (Sulitest) will introduce the Knowledge Accelerators, BIOFIN-EU partner Ellen Jordan (University of Limerick) will present her paper, A Critical Discourse Analysis of Biodiversity Disclosures, alongside CBS researchers.  

Learn more and join this dialogue

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BIOFIN-EU is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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