IPBES Warns One Million Species Face Extinction as Biodiversity Crisis Deepens

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services estimates that one million species are now threatened with extinction, representing a fundamental degradation of the natural systems that underpin economic activity and human wellbeing. CDP published this analysis on International Biodiversity Day, the first since the Global Biodiversity Framework was agreed by 196 countries in December 2022.

According to the IPCC, three-quarters of terrestrial ecosystems and two-thirds of marine ecosystems are now damaged or destroyed. The Global Footprint Network estimates humanity has exceeded planetary capacity for approximately fifty years, and now uses the equivalent of 1.75 Earths annually. Natural ecosystems sequester about 25 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year, but human activity releases over 50 gigatonnes. CDP argues that addressing biodiversity loss requires understanding it not as a separate challenge to climate, but as part of a single systemic problem: the gap between human demands on natural systems and those systems' capacity to supply them.

CDP frames biodiversity loss as a supply-side problem for the global economy. Biodiversity — defined as the variation of life within ecosystems — underpins ecosystem productivity, resilience and adaptability. High-biodiversity systems provide multiple services simultaneously, including carbon sequestration, rainfall regulation, food production and medicines, while low-diversity monocultures are dependent on external inputs and vulnerable to disruption. The loss of biodiversity therefore represents a degradation of the environmental infrastructure on which corporate value chains, particularly in agriculture, food processing, pharmaceuticals and water-intensive manufacturing, directly depend.

CDP calls for the twin processes of the UNFCCC and the Convention on Biological Diversity to move toward coordinated responses, and for corporate sustainability strategies to integrate nature-related risks alongside climate. The TNFD framework, whose recommendations CDP encourages companies to adopt, provides a structure for assessing and disclosing nature-related financial risks and opportunities. CDP's environmental database, covering disclosures from over 24,000 companies globally, is positioned as a primary source of data for tracking corporate progress against the targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework ahead of the first national reporting deadline in 2026.

Key figure — 1 million species threatened with extinction, according to IPBES