Carbon Subsumption: How Governing Net Zero Makes Biodiversity Invisible in Corporate Sustainability

This viewpoint develops the concept of carbon subsumption – the process through which sustainability governance privileges carbon as the dominant representation of environmental performance, rendering biodiversity visible only when it can be accommodated within carbon-based forms of evaluation. We argue that carbon dominates because it provides a universal, fungible unit which enables comparison, aggregation, and trading across firms and contexts, whereas biodiversity remains context-specific, non-fungible, and difficult to translate into comparable units. We identify three mechanisms through which carbon subsumption operates: assimilation, where biodiversity is reduced to carbon value; subordination, where biodiversity is marginalised within aggregated Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics; and exclusion, where biodiversity falls outside carbon accounting boundaries. This produces a governance paradox: environmental performance becomes comparable and auditable by suppressing ecological complexity. We conclude that sustainability governance should focus less on integrating biodiversity into carbon-centred systems and more on making carbon-biodiversity trade-offs visible.