​Current negative trends in nature could seriously undermine progress towards sustainable development. Only 10 years remain to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and progress has so far been insufficient, so increased effort is required to accelerate transformative pathways including further integration of biodiversity considerations into the wider implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) are a useful tool to assess country-level progress and the extent to which biodiversity is integrated into sustainable development approaches. While analyses and guidance on how to integrate environment or biodiversity into VNRs have been published, no study has compared the extent to which biodiversity is mainstreamed in the VNRs submitted to date. We therefore reviewed a relevant sample of 30 VNRs published between 2017-2019 to assess how biodiversity is reflected in national SDG implementation and review processes and found that overall only 20% mention biodiversity as a national priority for sustainable development. While our review shows that VNRs are beginning to reflect the integration of biodiversity into their reporting on progress towards the 2030 Agenda, more remains to be done to provide tools for enhancing technical capabilities for mainstreaming and to raise decisionmakers’ awareness of the importance of biodiversity in underpinning the 2030 Agenda.