Conservation Biology: Call for abstracts for a special issue on
The Business of Biodiversity and Conservation Outcomes
There is growing momentum to understand how business activity and financial decisions affect biodiversity. This special issue examines how firms influence biodiversity through operations, investment choices, procurement, disclosure, and supply chains. It also examines how decisions made by corporate leaders and by investors can advance conservation outcomes or contribute to biodiversity loss.
The special issue seeks to bridge the disciplinary gap between biodiversity conservation science and financial economics by identifying impacts, dependencies and opportunities at the intersection of business and biodiversity. The goal is to deepen understanding of the mechanisms through which business activity shapes biodiversity outcomes and of the risks firms face from biodiversity decline, while advancing the data, methods, interventions, governance tools, and policy reforms needed to support conservation.
Submissions may be coauthored by conservation and finance scholars who use collaboration not just to share data and methods but to make visible the conceptual and ethical tensions that shape real world conservation outcomes. We particularly welcome papers that examine where biodiversity protection conflicts with prevailing financial incentives and institutional rules, including mismatched definitions of value, risk, and impact. By naming these points of misalignment and analyzing how they influence decisions, the special issue seeks contributions that propose practical ways to bridge, navigate, or rethink them in support of biodiversity conservation.
Examples of submission topics and themes that are in scope include:
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New measures and tools to quantify firm biodiversity impacts and biodiversity risk exposure
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Empirical case studies linking firm or sector activity to biodiversity outcomes
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Biodiversity-related risk in business decisions: assessment, disclosure, and response practices
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Environmental, social, and governance investors and stewardship, including when engagement changes firm behavior
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Financial incentives for biodiversity beneficial action: certification, credits, and voluntary markets
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Corporate disclosure and accounting frameworks for biodiversity
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Behavioral and institutional barriers that limit firm level biodiversity action
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Theoretical models of firm environment interactions, thresholds, and incentive structures
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Cross sector collaborations between firms and conservation organizations
Deadline for abstract submission: 31 March 2026.
Submit an abstract by email to the Guest Editor Attila Balogh (balogh@unimelb.edu.au) by 31 March 2026. Abstracts will be evaluated for relevance to the issue theme and appropriateness for publication in Conservation Biology. Authors will be invited to submit a manuscript for peer review in April 2026, and the deadline for manuscript submission will be at the end of July 2026.
Abstract Requirements
Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and include the tentative title and article type (for details on article types, see here; please note we are not accepting Book Reviews, Editorials, or Letters for this special issue). Abstracts should include background contextualizing the work and provide a succinct description of the methods, principal results, and major inferences. In addition, abstracts should clearly indicate how the paper aligns with the focus of the special section as well as the aims and scope of Conservation Biology.
Please note: Conservation Biology is a hybrid journal. Open-access charges apply to those choosing this option. Standard page charges can be waived if there is financial need (corresponding author must be an SCB member).
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Lee Munger
Society for Conservation Biology
Washington DC
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