For years, environmental credentials in print have meant the management of carbon. Carbon Balance Paper, carbon offsetting, net-zero commitments - the sector has invested heavily and, on the whole, done it well
But the ground is shifting. From April 2026, the updated ISO 14001:2026 standard moves biodiversity from an optional consideration to a requirement that must be documented. Under the new Clause 4.1, businesses now have to assess how their operations both affect and depend on the natural world. For a print business, that means forests and fibre, freshwater, inks and chemicals, and, of course, the land around your own premises.
If that sounds like compliance, it’s of course, because it is. The more interesting question however, isn’t how to meet the requirement, it’s what happens if you treat it as an opportunity rather than a tick box exercise?
The scale of nature dependency is worth pausing on. The World Economic Forum[1] estimates that around 44 trillion US dollars of economic value generation – roughly a third of the global economy – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and the services it provides. When forests, freshwater and healthy soils degrade, that dependency turns into risk: to supply, to price, and ultimately to the businesses that rely on them. Your businesses sit squarely inside that exposure through reliance on wood fibre and water, but that also means the print sector has a genuine part to play. Responsible fibre sourcing, lower chemical loads reaching watercourses, and habitat supported rather than eroded are small individual acts that, across your industry, can add up to a measurable contribution to holding that value in place.
Let’s look at the businesses getting ahead of this. Analysis of the global paper and packaging industry by Bain & Company[2] presented a strong argument that biodiversity isn’t only a risk to manage but that it is becoming a source of competitive advantage, with leaders who use sustainable forestry and higher recycled content winning environmentally-minded customers ahead of the market.
Ingka Investments, the investment arm of IKEA’s largest retail group, is a good illustration of the direction of travel. In 2025 it allocated 16,000 hectares of its Latvian forest to a research trial with the European Forest Institute[3], testing closer-to-nature and continuous-cover methods – working with the forest without clear-felling it – to see whether resilience and biodiversity can be improved while timber yield is maintained. It’s early, and the results aren’t in yet. But the significance is in the question being asked at scale: can we keep harvesting and enhance nature at the same time, rather than choosing between the two?
The answer, on the evidence, is yes. In Sweden, SCA (Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget) – Europe’s largest private forest owner – runs one of the most productive forestry operations in Europe while committing serious area and effort to nature[4]. Decades of inventory-led forestry means the volume of living trees on its land is at a record high, with annual growth still outpacing harvest – and alongside that production, SCA sets aside around 15% of its holdings as conservation landscapes and has restored over 1,100 hectares of wetland. Production and active nature conservation run in parallel, not at each other’s expense.
This is where the idea of rewilding becomes relevant, and it’s worth being precise about why. No print business is going to rewild its car park, and claiming otherwise would rightly invite ridicule. But rewilding has done something valuable that the sector can learn from: it has made nature recovery a story people actually want to hear. Knepp Estate in West Sussex is the obvious example. Two decades after its owners abandoned loss-making intensive farming, it has become one of Britain’s most significant biodiversity sites – and, crucially, a profitable business, with its nature-tourism operation now turning over around £800,000 a year and the wider estate employing far more people than it did as a farm. The lesson isn’t “rewild everything.” It’s that visible, genuine nature recovery has commercial pull.
The pattern across all three is consistent – action first, story second. The credibility comes from doing the work; the advantage comes from being able to show it.
For a print business, the proportionate version of that is real but modest: managing the land around your site for wildlife rather than tidiness, improving what you can influence in your fibre supply chain, cutting the chemical load that reaches watercourses. None of it is landscape-scale rewilding. All of it is real, documentable action that ISO 14001:2026 will increasingly expect anyway – and that, made visible, becomes part of your identity rather than a line in a compliance file.
The IPIA’s own research[5] shows the print industry doing more good work than it gets credit for, and losing the narrative battle on sustainability outside the sector. That’s the gap worth closing. Carbon told one story and now through real world nature enhancements, no matter the size, we have the opportunity to tell a richer one – more local, more visible, more tied to place. A woodland you’ve helped manage, a watercourse you’ve helped protect where our kids can now swim safely, a supply chain you’ve genuinely improved : these are things a customer can see and a competitor can’t easily copy.
The businesses that treat the 2026 standard as the floor rather than the ceiling will be the ones telling that story first. Credentials are the foundation, but like a newly planted woodland they will flourish and become richer with the right stewardship. What you build on those foundations is the advantage.
[1] World Economic Forum (2020) Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy. New Nature Economy series. Geneva: World Economic Forum, in collaboration with PwC. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/reports/nature-risk-rising-why-the-crisis-engulfing-nature-matters-for-business-and-the-economy/ (Accessed: 6 July 2026).
[2] Elofsson, E., Nordbø, E. and Rutigliano, M. (2023) The Paper and Packaging Industry Faces a Biodiversity Crisis. Bain & Company, 30 August. Available at: https://www.bain.com/insights/paper-and-packaging-faces-biodiversity-crisis-paper-and-packaging-report-2023/ (Accessed: 7 July 2026).
[3] Inter IKEA Group (2025) IKEA allocates 16,000 hectares of forests for research to further improve responsible forest management. 20 May. Available at: https://www.ikea.com/global/en/newsroom/sustainability/ikea-allocates-16000-hectares-of-forests-for-research-to-further-improve-responsible-forest-management-250520/ (Accessed: 7 July 2026).
[4] SCA (2026) Managed forests and Estimated harvesting. Available at: https://www.sca.com/en/forest/scas-forests/forestry/managed-forests/ and https://www.sca.com/en/forest/scas-forests/forestry/planning/estimated-harvesting/ (Accessed: 7 July 2026).
[5] Independent Print Industries Association (2024) The New Narrative. IPIA, November. Available at: [members’ download — via members.ipia.org.uk] (Accessed: 7 July 2026).
