What is ISO 17298:2025? The New International Standard for Biodiversity Management Systems

For years, organizations that wanted to manage their relationship with nature systematically had to improvise — borrowing pieces from environmental management standards, conservation guidelines and disclosure frameworks. With the publication of ISO 17298:2025, that changed. Biodiversity now has its own management-system standard. This guide explains what ISO 17298 requires, which organizations should pay attention, how the standard is structured, and what the path to implementation and potential certification looks like.

What is ISO 17298:2025?

ISO 17298:2025 is an international standard providing requirements and guidance for a biodiversity management system — a structured, continually improving framework through which an organization manages its impacts and dependencies on biodiversity. That dual focus matters: organizations do not just affect species, ecosystems and genetic diversity; they also rely on them, whether through raw materials, water regulation, soil fertility, pollination or the landscapes that underpin industries like tourism.

The standard operationalizes the mitigation hierarchy — avoid, minimize, restore and, where appropriate, offset impacts on nature — inside a familiar management-system architecture. It arrives at a moment of intense global attention on biodiversity: the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework has set ambitious international goals, natural-capital approaches are maturing, and nature-related disclosure initiatives are pushing companies to understand and report their nature risks. ISO 17298 gives organizations a credible, auditable way to respond.

Who does it apply to?

ISO 17298 is written for organizations of any size or sector whose activities, products or services interact with biodiversity. In practice, the standard is especially relevant to:

• Land-intensive sectors — agriculture, forestry, aquaculture and land development
• Extractive industries — mining, oil and gas, quarrying
• Infrastructure and construction — energy, transport, utilities and real estate projects that alter habitats
• Tourism and hospitality, particularly operations in or near sensitive natural areas
• Finance and investment, where nature-related risk in portfolios is under growing regulatory and investor scrutiny
• Manufacturers and retailers with supply chains rooted in agricultural or natural commodities

If your organization has faced questions from investors, lenders, regulators or customers about deforestation, habitat loss, species protection or nature-related risk, ISO 17298 is the framework designed to answer them systematically.

Key benefits of implementation

• A credible, consistent basis for biodiversity action — replacing scattered initiatives with a coherent, verifiable system
• Better risk management around nature-related dependencies that can disrupt operations and supply chains
• Compliance readiness as biodiversity regulation tightens across jurisdictions
• Stronger stakeholder trust — communities, NGOs, investors and regulators respond to structured commitments backed by evidence
• Alignment with global goals, letting the organization demonstrate a genuine contribution to international biodiversity targets
• Integration efficiency — the system slots alongside existing ISO 14001 environmental management rather than duplicating it

There is also a strategic upside: organizations that understand their dependencies on nature early tend to secure resources, permits and social license ahead of competitors that treat biodiversity as a reporting afterthought.

What's inside a biodiversity management system

An ISO 17298-based system contains the recognizable machinery of a modern management system, tuned to nature:

• Biodiversity policy and leadership commitment, with defined roles and accountability
• Context analysis — understanding the organization's interfaces with species, ecosystems and genetic diversity, and the expectations of interested parties
• Impact and dependency assessment — identifying where operations, products and value chains affect or rely on biodiversity
• Objectives aligned with the mitigation hierarchy — prioritizing avoidance and minimization before restoration and offsetting
• Action plans and operational controls for land use, sourcing, site management and project design
• Stakeholder engagement procedures, including communities, conservation bodies and regulators
• Competence and training programs to build biodiversity literacy across relevant functions
• Monitoring and measurement of biodiversity performance indicators and progress against objectives
• Reporting mechanisms supporting transparent, nature-related disclosure
• Internal audit, management review and continual improvement cycles

The structure of the standard

ISO 17298 follows the ISO Harmonized Structure (High-Level Structure) shared by modern management-system standards, organizing requirements around the familiar clauses:

1. Context of the organization — internal and external issues, interested parties and system scope
2. Leadership — policy, commitment, roles and responsibilities
3. Planning — impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities, objectives and planning of actions
4. Support — resources, competence, awareness, communication and documented information
5. Operation — operational planning and control of biodiversity-relevant activities
6. Performance evaluation — monitoring, measurement, analysis, internal audit and management review
7. Improvement — nonconformity, corrective action and continual improvement

This architecture embeds the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle and makes integration with ISO 14001, ISO 9001 and other harmonized standards straightforward — a major advantage for organizations running integrated management systems.

The road to implementation and certification

Because ISO 17298 is a requirements-based management-system standard, it supports internal implementation, internal audit and management review — and potentially third-party certification by accredited certification bodies where certification schemes exist. A sensible roadmap:

1. Gap analysis — compare current environmental and land-management practices against the standard's clauses.
2. Impact and dependency baseline — assess where the organization touches and relies on nature; this is the system's analytical foundation.
3. System design and documentation — policy, procedures, registers, objectives and monitoring frameworks aligned to the mitigation hierarchy.
4. Implementation — operational controls, stakeholder engagement, training and data collection in live operations.
5. Internal audit and management review — verify conformity and effectiveness.
6. Certification audit — where schemes are available, an accredited body assesses the system, typically in a staged process followed by periodic surveillance audits.

Early adopters gain a further advantage: shaping their biodiversity baseline and evidence trail now, before disclosure regulations and customer requirements make it mandatory under time pressure.

How AGS can help

Being early to a new standard usually means drafting everything yourself — unless someone has already done the work. The AGS ISO 17298:2025 Biodiversity Management System toolkit (Standard tier, 54 files) provides a complete documentation platform: an editable biodiversity manual, procedures covering impact and dependency assessment, the mitigation hierarchy, stakeholder engagement and monitoring, supporting forms and registers, and compliance matrices mapping every document to the standard's clauses.

All content is fully editable, so sustainability teams can tailor the system to their sector, sites and value chain rapidly and arrive at internal or third-party audits with a coherent, evidence-ready system. If biodiversity is moving up your risk register — and for most sectors it is — the AGS toolkit is the fastest route from intention to implementation. Find it in the AGS online store.

View the toolkit →