BRUSSELS — Even as nations struggle to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, the European Union is taking on a potentially more complicated environmental challenge: preserving the world’s biodiversity.

Last week, the European Commission put biodiversity at the center of its annual Green Week conference in Brussels after E.U. environment ministers warned in March against “going beyond the limits of nature,” and after heads of state and government endorsed the ministers’ pledge to halt biodiversity loss in the Union by 2020 and step up efforts to avert such losses globally.

The conference brought together corporate executives, bankers and government ministers to discuss the benefits of healthy soils, fresh water supplies and plentiful forests, and to explore ways to create a framework to maintain them worldwide.

“There is such a thing as finite resources,” Norbert Röttgen, the German environment minister, warned delegates.