SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE Embedding biodiversity and ecosystem services in corporate sustainability: A strategy to enable Sustainable Development Goals Margherita Macellari | Natalia Marzia Gusmerotti | Marco Frey | Francesco Testa Institute of Management of the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy Correspondence Margherita Macellari, Piazza Martiri della Libertà, 24 56127 ‐ Pisa, Italy. Email: margherita.macellari@santannapisa.it Abstract The Sustainable Development Goals are a powerful lever to mainstream sustainability priorities in business' strategies and operations. At the same time, a new corporate sustainability based on a strategic understanding and management of biodiversity and ecosystem services is key to enact the new agenda for development. With the aim to better understand how businesses can operationalize the Agenda 2030, authors adopt a transdisciplinary approach and carry out an analysis of selected Italian business practices focused on biodiversity and ecosystem services management. Through a content analysis method and with the contribution of practitioners and experts, the main impacts of the practices have then been reconciled with the new framework for development. Finally, from primary data collected and further sup- ported by semistructured interviews with company representatives (sustainability and environmental departments), authors propose a conceptual model that connects strategic biodiversity and ecosystem services management, its drivers and barriers, with the Sustainable Development Goals. KEYWORDS Sustainable Development Goals, biodiversity, ecosystem services, business, management, strategy 1 | INTRODUCTION Scientists in the past decades provided evidences in support of the argument that human survival and development intrinsically depends on biodiversity, Earth's ecosystems, their products, and services (Reid et al., 2005). Despite of this increasing awareness, trends in biodiversity loss and ecosystems degradation continue on an expo- nential trajectory (E/2017/66). In the Anthropocene epoch (Lewis & Maslin, 2015), human impacts on ecosystems have reached or even passed some of the so‐called planetary boundaries (Griggs et al., 2013; Vasseur et al., 2017), approaching dangerous tipping points. In order to guide human and economic activities in addressing these systemic challenges, in 2012, in the final document of the Rio + 20 Conference “The future we want,” the 193 UN Member States recognized the urgency to take action against the current deg- radation of the earth system. Starting from the proposal of 300 goals, after 3 years of intense multilateral negotiation, countries ended up with the definition of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); 169 underlying targets; 230 global indicators. The UN Resolution “Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Develop- ment” (United Nations General Assembly, 2015) entered into force on January 2016. The 17 SDGs introduce a new holistic perspective, being (a) entirely dedicated to sustainable development; (b) universal and inclu- sive, addressing all countries and actors, with a strong call to action directed to the private sector; and (c) broader in their scope with respect to their predecessors—the Millennium Development Goals. Moreover, the multistakeholder approach offered by the SDGs results in line with the multiactor scenario characterizing the current model of global governance. They reflect the recognition, highlighted in sustainability science, that current sustainability challenges are com- plex and dynamic problems for which no ready‐made solution is avail- able and no “one size fit all” approach is applicable (Hirsch Hadorn, Bradley, Pohl, & Rist, 2006; Schaltegger, Beckmann, & Hansen, 2013). Received: 31 December 2017 Revised: 31 May 2018 Accepted: 20 July 2018 DOI: 10.1002/bsd2.34 244 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Bus Strat Dev. 2018;1:244–255. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/bsd2