A critical evaluation of research into accounting for biodiversity and ecosystems to inform future research pathways

The aim of this research is to critically review the research that discusses accounting for biodiversity and ecosystems in the broad business and economic field comprising accounting, business, management, economics, econometrics and finance journals. We explore these works through a semi-systematic literature review grounded in Alvesson and Deetz’s (2021) critical framework of insight, critique and transformative redefinition. Overall, we analyzed 239 articles retrieved from Scopus and the Web of Science databases under the categories accounting, business, management, economics, econometrics and finance. We then read and coded the articles to determine which accounting topics were present in the different research fields. The insights resulted in four transformative redefinitions. Four topics pertaining to biodiversity and ecosystems are present in the corpus of research – biodiversity measurement, biodiversity offsetting, extinction accounting and biodiversity reporting. By critiquing these four accounting topics, we identified four transformative redefinitions that entail just as many avenues for further research: (1) the opportunities and pitfalls of biodiversity and ecosystem measurement, (2) the need to move on with biodiversity reporting, (3) accounting for conservation and rewilding and (4) accounting for the sixth mass extinction. This literature review provides a critique of research emanating from business and economics studies at large and the way that these fields of knowledge have dealt with biodiversity and ecosystem accounting over the past few decades. Moreover, the review extends beyond mapping extant research to uncover ideas, thoughts, beliefs, the conditions of power and the dominant ideologies that are shaping the field of biodiversity accounting.