The Palette Economy – Balancing biodiversity, climate and financial considerations in a business context

Our society faces a triple planetary crisis including biodiversity loss, climate change and pollution (UN, 2025). We identified in a recent interview study with global businesses that biodiversity is not prioritized like climate or financials. These interviews together with a business survey and literature review, confirms the challenge of managing biodiversity in a business context.To achieve transformative change, the business sector needs to incorporate biodiversity in a holistic way. The balanced scorecard could improve decision-making for business managers with broad set of measures and increased understanding of interrelationships. It moves away from silo-structures and enable problem solving (Kaplan & Norton, 1992). To manage multiple planetary crisis, we suggest a balanced scorecard influenced approach including biodiversity and climate in line with IPBES Nexus Assessment (IPBES, 2024).The presentation focuses on the proposed “Palette Economy” with nature as a non-human stakeholder to navigate business essential environmental risks (Kopnina et al., 2024). This new decision-making approach aims to manage time and information asymmetries in business models, business cases and incentive programs, and to balance biodiversity, climate and financial considerations. Business benefits are improved applied decision-making when identifying risks and opportunities. We will further develop this new concept in a case study context. References: IPBES (2024). Thematic Assessment Report on the Interlinkages among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Harrison, P. A., McElwee, P. D., and van Huysen, T. L. (eds.). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13850054Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (1992). The Balanced Scorecard—Measures That Drive Performance. Harvard Business Review, 70(1), 71–79.Kopnina, H., Zhang, S. R., Anthony, S., Hassan, A., & Maroun, W. (2024). The inclusion of biodiversity into Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) framework: A strategic integration of ecocentric extinction accounting. Journal of Environmental Management, 351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.119808UN. (2025). UN environment agency calls for urgent action on ´triple planetary crisis´. United Nations (UN). https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/116023