The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species provides assessments of extinction risk for over 80,000 species. It has become an important tool for conservation and for informing natural resource policy and management more broadly. Over the last 10-15 years, the role of the Red List in business decision-making has become increasingly significant. We describe the key business uses of the Red List and their benefits to conservation, focusing on industrial-scale development and supply chains. The Red List is used by business throughout the process of planning and implementing projects, in order to understand and manage potential impacts on biodiversity. It informs screening and impact avoidance, baseline survey design, impact assessment and mitigation, biodiversity action plan development, and offset design and implementation. Business use could be strengthened by recognizing business needs when prioritizing improvements, so as to address specific aspects of consistency and coverage, access, information relevance, and assessment transparency. Finding effective ways to feed relevant business-generated data back into the Red List process would, in turn, strengthen the assessments. The crucial role that the Red List has assumed in good-practice business decision-making represents both a success and an opportunity for the Red List community.

Achieving a climate-resilient future requires rapid, sustained and far-reaching transformations in energy, land-use, infrastructure and industrial systems. Large-scale expansion of renewable energy can play a critical role in meeting the world’s growing energy demands and in the fight against climate change. However, even ‘clean’ energy sources can have significant unintended impacts on the environment. The guidelines aim to provide practical support for solar and wind energy developments by effectively managing risks and improving overall outcomes related to biodiversity and ecosystem services. They are industry-focused and can be applied across the whole project development life cycle, from early planning through to decommissioning and repowering, using the mitigation hierarchy as a clear framework for planning and implementation. The mitigation hierarchy is applied to direct, indirect and cumulative impacts.

Increasing exploitation of marine natural resources and expansion of energy infrastructure, shipping, and aquaculture across the oceans are placing increased pressure on marine life. Biodiversity offsets, as the last stage of the mitigation hierarchy, provide an opportunity to promote a more sustainable basis for development by addressing residual impacts and achieving "no net loss" for biodiversity. Despite debate around their effectiveness, biodiversity offsets are seeing increasing application on land but remain a rarely used tool in the marine environment. We assess how offsets can be applied in the marine environment to achieve better biodiversity outcomes, and identify implications for conservation policy and practice. For instance, spatial conservation planning provides opportunities to move away from a siloed, project-by-project, approach by pooling offsets on a regional scale. There are real differences between marine and terrestrial environments in relation to ecology, connectivity, data availability, management options, and impact perception, and marine offsets are therefore often regarded as challenging. However, fundamental offset principles, types, and approaches apply equally on land and at sea. Marine biodiversity offset approaches can build on the experience of terrestrial offsets but can also innovate to help achieve biodiversity gains and contribute toward global and national biodiversity targets.

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