Biodiversity Finance: A Systematic Review and Interpretative Framework for an Emerging Research Frontier

The accelerating loss of biodiversity and ecosystem degradation are increasingly recognized as economically material phenomena with implications for financial markets and financial stability. Yet biodiversity finance remains fragmented across environmental economics, sustainable finance, corporate disclosure, risk management, and conservation finance. This paper provides a bibliometric and interpretative review of biodiversity finance based on 309 peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and April 2026. Using bibliographic coupling, we identify five interconnected clusters: natural capital valuation, biodiversity risk and asset pricing, firm-level exposure, biodiversity disclosure and governance, and conservation finance instruments. The analysis shows that the field is evolving from economic valuation and natural capital accounting toward a finance-oriented research frontier concerned with financial materiality, risk pricing, lending, disclosure, institutional mediation, and capital allocation. We identify three key barriers to consolidation: a persistent metric gap, limited causal evidence on transmission channels, and a misalignment between corporate biodiversity disclosure and actual ecological exposure. Building on these findings, we develop an integrative framework explaining how ecological degradation can translate into financial outcomes through physical, transition, and liability channels. We conclude with a research agenda on risk pricing, decision-useful metrics, disclosure credibility, instrument additionality, and regulation.