Group unveils nature metrics and indicators
- Key insight: See why a global coalition is distilling 600 environmental metrics into four core indicators.
- What’s at stake: Financial firms trying to track how their investments depend on and affect ecosystems.
- Supporting data: 29 companies pilot tested the new environmental framework.
The Nature Positive Initiative, a group of conservation organizations, institutes and business and finance coalitions, introduced the
Processing Content
For financial firms and institutions, the metrics offer a common, science-based way to understand and track how investments depend on and affect nature. The metrics distill the over 600 existing metrics in existing frameworks into four core indicators to give companies a clearer way to assess changes in ecosystems and species around sites and across landscapes.
The four indicators are Ecosystem Extent, Ecosystem Condition, Species Extinction Risk and Species Populations. The framework was pilot tested by 29 companies at over 50 sites in 23 countries, and its guidance covers measurement at both site and landscape or seascape scale.
The framework has been integrated into the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures’s framework as well as the Science-Based Targets Network, with the Global Reporting Initiative also moving toward integration, as part of a process to create greater consistency across the existing approaches. Last year, the International Sustainability Standards, which operates under the auspices of the International Financial Reporting Standards Board alongside the International Accounting Standards Board, announced it would be
Over 500 different experts and practitioners contributed to a two-year global process to establish a common approach to measuring changes in the state of nature, with the main focus being on the private sector — to help understand nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities — approved by the 27 core member organizations of the
The framework was developed with the goal of identifying a minimum set of indicators and metrics that are scientifically rigorous, practical to use, accessible to a broad range of organizations, and suitable for being embedded consistently across standards, frameworks and reporting systems. The group aims to complement rather than replace the existing metrics.
“Nature underpins our economies, our health, our food and water systems, a stable climate and the resilience of businesses and communities worldwide,” said Marco Lambertini, convener of the Nature Positive Initiative, in a statement. “Yet until now there has been no clear consensus on how to measure whether efforts are leading to nature’s recovery. The State of Nature Indicators and Metrics plug a critical gap. They provide a practical, science-based, decision-useful and universally applicable way for businesses, financial institutions and other actors to understand their nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities and, most importantly, to assess whether their actions are helping to put nature on a path to recovery while building their own resilience.”
Technical partners who worked with the Nature Positive Initiative to develop the framework to this initiative included EY, the Biodiversity Consultancy, the World Economic Forum, the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance and a technical working group of the 27 Nature Positive Initiative core members.
“If you want to continue to create the prosperity humanity needs, we need to be able to use nature in a way that is sustainable. The best way to do this is to actually start to measure it,” said André Hoffmann, vice chairman of Roche, co-chair of the World Economic Forum and co-founder of InTent, in a statement.
The new State of Nature Indicators and Metrics
Introductory bullet points created by AI with editorial review.
