Beyond Carbon: With AI, Biodiversity Must Be on the Corporate Radar
Microsoft’s 2025 Environmental Sustainability Report highlights impressive progress toward its ambitious 2030 goals: becoming carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste, while protecting ecosystems. The scale of its investments—over 34 GW of carbon-free electricity, millions of tons of contracted carbon removal, and more than 1.5 million people provided with clean water access—illustrates the transformative power of corporate climate action.
Yet amid the numbers and milestones, one critical element remains under-recognized: biodiversity. Most major sustainability frameworks—and the companies adopting them—focus on carbon, water, and waste because these can be quantified, priced, and reported. Biodiversity, by contrast, resists easy measurement. The complexity of ecosystems makes it hard to capture their value in the language of metrics and accounting. As a result, the impact of business operations on species, habitats, and ecological resilience is often relegated to the margins of sustainability strategies.
This gap is dangerous. Climate stability and biodiversity are not parallel challenges—they are inseparable. Forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and grasslands are not just carbon sinks; they are living systems that regulate water, protect against disasters, and sustain livelihoods. When they collapse, so too does the foundation for long-term climate resilience.
Microsoft’s report does acknowledge ecosystems, noting efforts to exceed its land-protection targets and deploy AI tools like the Planetary Computer to monitor biodiversity. This signals an important step: moving beyond carbon metrics toward ecosystem thinking. Yet compared with the scale of corporate climate commitments, these biodiversity efforts remain rare. Tesla, for example, has revolutionized clean energy and electric mobility, but its sustainability reporting focuses overwhelmingly on emissions reductions and supply chain minerals — with little direct engagement on biodiversity impacts of mining or land use. Google has made bold pledges on carbon-free energy and uses AI for climate modeling, but its ecological footprint and the biodiversity implications of massive data-center expansion are not systematically addressed. Amazon, despite investing in renewable energy and pledging to reach net-zero by 2040, has biodiversity primarily framed through its reforestation projects, without fully integrating ecosystem health into its logistics and global operations.
In other words, across industries — from tech giants to clean-energy disruptors — biodiversity remains a secondary or peripheral concern, not a core metric of success. This contrasts sharply with carbon, where disclosure frameworks, regulatory pressure, and financial risk assessments have created strong incentives for transparency and action. Until biodiversity loss is treated with the same urgency, rigor, and investment as carbon emissions, corporate sustainability strategies will remain incomplete — addressing the symptoms of environmental breakdown without safeguarding the living systems that underpin climate resilience and economic stability.
At Sierra A Mar, we believe this is the next frontier: joining forces between companies, scientists, technologists, and communities to make biodiversity visible, measurable, and actionable. It’s not easy — datasets are fragmented, and AI tools are still evolving — but evidence shows that what once seemed too messy can be organized, and what was once undetectable can now be revealed. By integrating AI capabilities and building the tools, partnerships, and narratives that bring biodiversity into corporate decision-making, what seems “hard to calculate” today can become the baseline for responsible business tomorrow.
Because without biodiversity, there is no climate stability. And without ecosystems, there is no economy.
