King's College London

Every 5 June, organisations across sectors mark World Environment Day. Posts about renewed nature-related commitments and projects are shared on social media. The day offers an annual moment to assess where the global conversation about nature has got to and what it is still unable to ask.

How a company impacts and depends on nature is increasingly becoming an important business concern. Major developments like the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), the global agreement to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030 and the EU sustainability rules are shifting the landscape and facilitating the proliferation of “nature-positive” corporate commitments. These developments matter. But they also raise questions. We must look beyond whether organisations are engaging with nature to ask what kind of engagement it is, on whose terms, with what consequences and at whose expense. Here are five questions guiding some of work nature at our Centre:

1. Why do organisations really choose to engage with nature?

The way a business measures its “impact on nature” reveals a great deal about its true motivations for nature protection. Companies often engage with nature only when biodiversity loss threatens them financially, ignoring the severe toll their supply chains take on natural ecosystems. Relatedly, a meaningful action requires companies to move beyond one-size-fits-all pledges and design specific, on-the-ground strategies that tackle exactly how their business impacts nature. The key question is no longer whether a company can produce a polished nature strategy, but whether its day-to-day engagement with nature is designed to protect ecosystems or simply protect the bottom line.

2. When scientific data and local knowledge clash, whose voice is prioritised?

The push for nature-related reporting has created a boom in technical assessments: biodiversity baselines, satellite land analyses and standardised metrics. While these produce comparable data, they often ignore the deep, intergenerational knowledge of communities who have lived on the land for centuries. When scientific and traditional accounts disagree, deciding which is authoritative is a question of valuing different ways of knowing and choosing whose voice is respected. Recent research emphasises that legitimate knowledge about nature is tied to specific places and people, not just metrics.

3. How can a biodiversity loss in one place equal a “gain” elsewhere?

Biodiversity offsetting and credit markets rely on a major assumption: that degrading nature in one place can be fixed by restoring it somewhere else. Ecology does not support this. A wetland in one region cannot simply replace a wetland in another, and the people harmed by the nature loss are rarely those who benefit from the offset. Research by Wiart (2026) highlighted how offsetting is also used to legitimise extractive activities and how these mechanisms treat both human communities and other-than-humans’ lives as mere resources. As these markets grow, we must urgently question who gets to decide that these instruments are fair.

4. Who is in the room when governance rules are written?

Nature governance is created by different actors, including corporations, financial institutions, NGOs and scientific advisors. However, the communities most affected by corporate impacts, particularly Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, are often absent from these decision-making processes. Sometimes they are formally consulted; often they are not. As critical business scholars argue, environmental justice must be embedded in our core practices. The rules governing corporate nature-related activities are being written right now. Who participates in writing them will shape what companies are required to do for decades to come.

5. Whose “long term” are we protecting?

Some nature-related corporate communication mentions “the long term” and “future generations”. But we need to specify exactly whose future we mean. Are nature strategies built around an investor’s five-year horizon, a human lifetime or the centuries required for some ecosystems to recover? Organisations must learn to respect the planet’s ecological limits and the unpredictable, often slow pace of natural restoration. When acting on nature, businesses need to leave behind the expectation of quick fixes and instead align their timelines with the cycles of the natural world.

Question-Keeping Over Easy Answers

These five questions are not abstract. They are urgent decisions to be reflected upon on this World Environment Day and onwards. In a world filled with quick fixes and vast amounts of information, it is increasingly important to keep asking the difficult questions. Nature commitments are easier to make than to keep. The harder, slower and more important work lies in asking who these nature pledges serve, who decided their terms and what they must actually look like to drive genuine change. If these questions resonate with your work—whether in a business, NGO, consultancy, charity, regulator or another research centre—we would be interested to hear from you.

 

Ai-Peri Dzhumashalieva is a PhD Researcher at the Centre for Sustainable Business (CSB)

For more on our work, visit our page here as well as follow the centre on LinkedIn. To get in touch, write to sustainablebusiness@kcl.ac.uk or ai-peri.dzhumashalieva@kcl.ac.uk