When rivers degrade, pests spread or drought hits crops, nature sends a bill.

Yet it’s one rarely itemised on any balance sheet, because nature’s contribution to business remains genuinely hard to quantify.

One major obstacle is data. Businesses rarely disclose their precise operating locations, while detailed ecological information that can be linked to specific firms is scarce in most countries.

This is despite healthy ecosystems underpinning large parts of the economy, from agriculture and forestry to tourism and food production. As the US economist Herman Daly famously put it, the economy is “a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse”.

As part of a growing body of global research now trying to put hard numbers on what nature actually contributes to the economy, we looked at New Zealand’s case.

Our newly completed research turned up a compelling finding: firms operating in areas with richer biodiversity are measurably more productive.

Measuring nature’s value

We chose New Zealand because it publishes detailed sets of business and environmental data. That allowed us to compare company performance with local ecological conditions across different regions.

We combined measures of sales and employment with biodiversity indicators – including river........

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