Overcoming limitations in selection guidelines for state-of-nature metrics in corporate assessments

Katia Sanchez-Ortiz, Benjamin Stimpson, Ashley H.Y. Bang, Talitha Bromwich, Joseph W Bull, Rachel N Martin, E.J. Milner-Gulland, Michael Clark

The development and adoption of frameworks to help organisations understand, monitor, and disclose their biodiversity risks and impacts have accelerated due to Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Organisations are increasingly expected not only to measure their biodiversity pressures and responses, but also to demonstrate whether their actions lead to negative or positive outcomes in the state-of-nature (SON). Recent frameworks, such as the Nature Positive Initiative, have begun to standardise the aspects of the SON that companies are expected to measure. However, an open question remains on how an organisation should select the specific metrics to measure these aspects in their ecological, geographical, and operational contexts.
In this essay, we review eight frameworks and tools supporting corporate SON metric selection and identify three problems that limit their effectiveness in directing users to named metrics suited to their SON assessments. First, criteria for evaluating metrics’ applicability and quality are inconsistently defined and poorly harmonised across frameworks, leaving users uncertain about which metrics are suitable for their context. Second, insufficient evidence has been generated and collated to assess metrics’ alignment with and performance against these criteria. Third, existing selection guidelines lack sufficient stepwise structure to guide users to high-quality metrics that are suitable for their context.
We argue that more effective guidelines for SON metrics selection require three corresponding improvements: harmonised definition of applicability and quality criteria, derived from existing frameworks; scaled-up data-gathering on how metrics align with and perform against applicability and quality criteria; and structured pathways to assess metrics’ applicability and quality to progressively filter candidate metrics down to a recommended set. In resolving these issues, guidelines’ contextual flexibility can be balanced with rigour in metric selection, allowing guidance frameworks to support wider and more robust disclosures of SON metrics, contributing towards achieving Target 15 by 2030.