Ensuring long-term business competitiveness and viability increasingly depends on implementing strategies and solutions grounded in biodiversity and climate science, which enable the building of resilient value chains capable of withstanding not only global ecological risks, but also a rapidly changing and volatile economic and geopolitical landscape. At the same time, the private sector plays a crucial role in achieving the goals set by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030.

On the 22nd of October, the RESPIN project hosted a workshop to explore ways better to integrate biodiversity and climate knowledge into business decision-making. The event brought together practitioners from international business sustainability platforms and pioneering companies, alongside representatives from science-policy interfaces. These included, in particular, experts from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), two of the main international brokers of biodiversity and climate knowledge.

 

 

 

Prior to the group discussion, RESPIN, IPCC and IPBES were introduced, respectively, by Kaisa Korhonen-Kurki (Finnish Environment Institute, Syke), Eeva Primmer (IPBES Bureau) and Karle Kupiainen (Finland's National IPCC Working Group).

 

 

 

 

Through an interactive exercise, participants discussed practical examples of how IPCC and IPBES knowledge is used in business, identified barriers, and explored pathways to further integrate biodiversity and climate knowledge into business decision-making processes, including the key actors best positioned to drive change.

The workshop was co-organized with the BioAgora project, which is developing the forthcoming Science Service for Biodiversity, the EU’s main mechanism for connecting biodiversity knowledge holders with policy-makers. The findings from the workshop will be published in a public report by Autumn 2026. In the meantime, RESPIN will soon released a factsheet on Business for Biodiversity and Climate: Leveraging Insights from IPCC and IPBES.