The large-scale disappearance of vultures in India was for years as much of a mystery as it was an apparent irrelevance. Yet recent groundbreaking research has demonstrated the cost of their loss to human health and planetary biodiversity alike — and helped to vindicate ways to measure academic work that aligns with societal impact.

Once ubiquitous across the subcontinent, vulture populations plummeted to almost zero in the late 1990s. The decline was subsequently linked to a surge in use by farmers of the veterinary painkiller diclofenac to treat fevers in livestock, once the drug’s patent expired and its price plummeted.

While harmless to humans, exposure to even small doses of the drug caused lethal kidney failure in vultures when they fed off the carcasses of previously treated animals. It led to an estimated reduction in numbers of the scavenger from 50mn to almost none.

The finding showed the importance of vultures as a pivotal “keystone species” in the ecosystem. Animal corpses that vultures previously stripped bare in just 40 minutes were consumed far less efficiently by a growing number of rats and dogs. These also spread disease while leaving infected and partially digested carcasses on land or in rivers.

As Eyal Frank at the University of Chicago and Anant Sudarshan at the University of Warwick showed in a paper published last year linking localised vulture losses to an increase in associated human disease, the drop in sanitation increased human mortality by more than 4 per cent, at an estimated cost of $69.4bn per year.

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Their paper, “The social costs of keystone species collapse: evidence from the decline of vultures in India”, published in the American Economic Review in 2024, was one of the highest-scoring recent articles among business school and university publications measured by alignment with the priorities identified in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (see top 10 below).

The paper also scored highly in other measures used in the FT’s latest research ranking, including Digital Science’s “alternative metrics”, which track media and social media discussion of papers, and Overton’s references in government and policymakers’ reports.

Such scores highlight the value of measuring the content of academic papers to demonstrate how far business schools and other university departments are conducting work that aligns with pressing societal needs — not least around climate change and broader environmental effects of human intervention.

Johannes Stroebel, professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, who has separately explored the broader macroeconomic effects of biodiversity loss, praised the vulture study as a rare attempt to quantify damage to the ecosystem.

While the economic effects of climate change on business and society — notably from flooding and insurance claims — have long been analysed, the complexity of biodiversity loss has, until recently, defied much rigorous analysis.

But Frank’s experience also points to the difficulties in conducting such pioneering work. His prior seminal study, which inspired the work on vultures, looked at the occurrence from 2006 of lethal white nose syndrome in pest-eating bats in the US. The research showed an average 31 per cent increase in the use of pesticides in affected areas, with an associated rise of more than 4 per cent in human mortality. Yet the bat disease study was only published in 2025, seven years after he first submitted a draft — and then not in a business or economic peer-reviewed publication but in the journal Science. It has since been widely cited by others.

“This kind of work suffered at the beginning, with people questioning whether testing these connections was economics,” says Frank. “To me, it’s very obvious: we have this natural resource we need to better understand. But there is always a challenge with trying to expand the tent and bring in something new.”

His work was subsequently picked up by non-governmental groups lobbying for reforms, including Saving Asia’s Vultures from Extinction (Save) and Bat Conservation International. But Frank says there are disincentives in academia even to spend time disseminating findings to policymakers.

“I’m not tenured, and currently my incentives are to publish within the walls of academia,” Frank says. “You get very few points, and maybe negative ones, for doing policy outreach. You are evaluated solely based on your academic contributions. My time is better spent writing other papers.”

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The FT generated SDG scores using papers written by business school academics and analysed by OpenAlex, an open access depository of articles. OpenAlex itself draws on a classification system of key words and phrases in the SDG Research Dashboard developed by Aurora, a consortium of European research-intensive universities.

Another paper that scored highly using this method was “AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation”, published in Science last year by a series of authors at Google DeepMind, an AI research laboratory, including Michiel Bakker, now based at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Civil debate: Politicians in the House of Commons — researchers say AI can help people find common ground on divisive issues

The paper described their efforts to train the Habermas Machine. This large language model was designed as an AI mediator to help small groups in the UK find common ground while discussing divisive political issues such as Brexit, immigration, the minimum wage, climate change and universal childcare. The model has since been tested further, with efforts to explore AI-mediated deliberation to improve fairness, transparency and inclusivity in discussion on sensitive topics, according to Google DeepMind.

That points to the value of collaborative research between academics and those in the private sector — something increasingly embraced by technology groups such as Google. It also perhaps highlights the potential restrictions on academic freedom, since Bakker said he was unable to comment on the work and instead referred queries to the company.

Other papers rated highly for SDG content included “The lifetime costs of bad health”, which highlighted the roles played by genetics, early life circumstances, earnings sacrificed and lower life expectancy in reduced economic outcomes. Another, titled “Carbon returns across the globe”, suggested that carbon-intensive companies underperform in the US.

However, there is continued debate over the variation in outcomes from different models seeking to analyse SDG content in academic papers. Studies highlight discrepancies between the different ratings provided by OpenAlex and academic publications databases such as Web of Science and Scopus.

David Steingard, an associate professor at the Erivan K Haub School of Business at St Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, who has developed his own SDG dashboard, derives data from Scopus. His analysis for the FT of papers written by scholars at 75 business schools and universities shows that those from the US perform relatively poorly, with higher scores for institutions in South Africa, India, Thailand and the Netherlands.

“Why can’t elite schools also be elite at creating the kinds of positive social and environmental transformations we so desperately need in this era of grand challenges?” Steingard says. “Prestige they’ve got. Purpose, less so.”

Such analysis still leaves an important gap: by scoring papers based on keywords aligned with the SDGs (typically based on abstracts rather than the full content of articles), it is focused on the broad theme of the research rather than its originality, practical value or impact.

Steingard is seeking to refine his model by training it to take into account the papers judged by human experts to have high impact, including those that have won awards from the Responsible Research in Business and Management network.

Wilfred Mijnhardt, architect of a separate open source SDGMetrics tool at theRotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, has also been developing a broader approach to analyse academic research linked to future societal priorities.

With the SDGs set to expire in 2030, he instead explored the alignment of articles published in the FT50 list of leading business school journals with the UN’s more recent Our Common Agenda, as well as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Vision 2050.

Analysis using the Claude generative AI tool suggested that the articles in the journals Management Science and Information Systems Research were closest to the needs of business and society, while work around water, sanitation and food systems were among the most neglected topics.

The debate over how best to assess articles based on their SDG relevance, and the value in demonstrating ultimate impact, may be lively but it is far from settled.

Articles most aligned with selected sustainable development goals

Source: OpenAlex, year to July 2025

No seat at the table: how territoriality constrains cross-sector collaboration in disaster response** **Dorothee Nussbruch, Verena Girschik

Carbon returns across the globe** **Shaojun Zhang

Impact of climate policy uncertainty (CPU) and global energy uncertainty (EU) news on US sectors: the moderating role of CPU on the EU and US sectoral stock nexus** **Umar Kayani, Umaid A Sheikh, Rabeh Khalfaoui, David Roubaud, Shawkat Hammoudeh

Institution building without commitment** **Marco Bassetto, Zhen Huo, José-Víctor Ríos-Rull

Confucian culture, climate risk, and corporate environmental information disclosure quality: evidence from China** **Yuedong Li, Xiaoyue Yao

Uncertainty breeds opportunities: assessing climate policy uncertainty and its impact on corporate innovation** **Yulin Liu, Lin Chen, Zhiling Cao, Fenghua Wen

The social costs of keystone species collapse: evidence from the decline of vultures in India** **Eyal Frank, Anant Sudarshan

AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation** **Michael Henry Tessler, Michiel A Bakker, Daniel Jarrett, Hannah Sheahan, Martin J Chadwick, Raphael Koster, Georgina Evans, Lucy Campbell-Gillingham, Tantum Collins, David C Parkes, Matthew Botvinick, Christopher Summerfield

The lifetime costs of bad health** **Mariacristina De Nardi, Svetlana Pashchenko, Ponpoje Porapakkarm

Why did bank stocks crash during Covid-19?** **Viral V Acharya, Robert Engle, Maximilian Jager, Sascha Steffen