Sustainability policies’ secret sauce: rigorous but practical measurements
Marco Lambertini
Convener of the Nature Positive Initiative, Switzerland
A credible, standardized Nature Measurement Protocol is essential to mobilize the private sector and translate the Nature Positive goal into measurable, accountable action.
Published on April 9th, 2026
No global and ambitious environmental policy instrument can deliver without a whole-of-society approach. The private sector is key to delivering the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), and it is slowly coming to understand its dependency on healthy nature, as well as the risks and costs associated with its loss and degradation. To succeed in meaningfully engaging the private sector, we must incentivize its nature-positive journey by demystifying the complexity of biodiversity and providing aligned guidance that enables business and finance to drive and track their transition from nature-negative to nature-positive outcomes.
The Frontiers in Science lead article by Locke et al. (1) presents compelling, unequivocal evidence that conserving biodiversity is not optional, but essential to sustaining human well-being, economic prosperity, and social equity. It also rightly emphasizes the need to measure progress toward the Nature Positive goal and the implementation of the GBF. Few companies today measure their biodiversity impacts and outcomes (2, 3). One reason is the lack of a credible yet practical protocol of metrics and methodologies capable of driving genuine nature-positive outcomes and, in turn, de-risking businesses and creating new opportunities. We need a Nature Measurement Protocol, similar to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol used to drive climate action.
From the Great Rise and Decline to the Great Threat and Choice
We live in extraordinary times. Times of unprecedented crises and opportunities. Times of disorientating paradoxes. Times of choices and times of consequences.
Forget space exploration, the internet, or artificial intelligence. What makes our times truly unique in the history of our species and the planet is how the natural world, its extraordinary diversity of life and its sophisticated provisioning and regulatory systems, is succumbing to the pressures inflicted by one species: us.
The last few decades have seen exponential demographic growth, amazing scientific and technological advances, and improved quality of life for many people across many regions of the world. But the Great Rise of Humanity has had a dark side, too often inadvertently or conveniently ignored until recently: the Great Decline of Nature. This is the development paradox of our time, a human development model that grows by destroying its own foundation: nature, its resources, and its services. This is the Great Threat of our time: the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, the intertwined climate and nature crises (4).
At the same time, we are undoubtedly the most environmentally aware generation in history. Science has never been clearer, and awareness of our impact and its consequences has never been greater. Today, more people understand that climate change and biodiversity loss are not only moral failures in our relationship with the rest of life on the planet; they directly affect our society, economy and well-being (5, 6), and represent a security issue for humanity. Since 2020, biodiversity loss has consistently ranked among the top global risks for society and the economy identified by the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report (7).
This is the Great Awakening that leads us to the unique and extraordinary moment of the Great Choice: continue with a business-as-usual, nature-negative model and accept its well-known disastrous consequences, or embrace the Great Transition to a new nature-positive future. Stop taking nature for granted. Abandon the illusion that we can extract, destroy, overconsume, and waste natural resources without systemic consequences.
The evolving policy context and current landscape
Against a complex backdrop of evolving scientific evidence, societal awareness, antagonistic vested interests, and approaching ecological tipping points, the policy ecosystem on nature has evolved dramatically over the past few decades, albeit with a recent and perhaps unexpected twist. Historic global treaties on climate, biodiversity, and the high seas have been agreed alongside groundbreaking regional and national regulations, from the US Clean Water Act to the EU Green Deal and China’s Ecological Red Lines.
The simple but groundbreaking novelty of the Nature Positive goal lies in establishing the necessary global, science-based ambition for nature and providing a measurable global goal capable of aligning international, regional, and national policy and regulatory frameworks, while accelerating action through a whole-of-society approach. The adoption in 2022 of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, with its 2030 mission to halt and reverse biodiversity loss aligned with the Nature Positive goal definition (8), has rightly been described as the ‘Paris moment’ for nature. In practice, the Nature Positive goal is intended to catalyze and scale action across all stakeholder groups—from governments, companies, and financial institutions to communities and individuals—to generate net-positive biodiversity outcomes and contribute to the broader global societal mission codified in the GBF.
And yet, just as a net-zero and nature-positive transition becomes more urgent, the sustainability agenda faces new political headwinds, even in countries once seen as champions of sustainability and environmental leadership (notably the US and the EU), creating uncertainty precisely when clarity is most needed.
Driving the Great Transition: policy and the private sector
Scientific guidance and policy instruments on sustainability have too often failed to strike the right balance between rigour and practical usability. The result has been slow adoption and uneven implementation by governments, and particularly by the private sector.
Biodiversity is often perceived as a complex subject, and, until recently, was treated by most companies as a public relations, reputational, or philanthropic issue. Unlike in the climate space, complicated and fragmented approaches to measuring nature’s many dimensions only add to this perception of complexity, creating confusion, lack of confidence, and, in the worst cases, an excuse for inaction. To ensure wide adoption, action at scale and stronger accountability—whether by national or sub-national governments, businesses or investors—it is key to have a common protocol of standardized, universal metrics and methodologies. These should enable actors to measure progress in both reducing negative impacts and driving nature recovery, while guiding strategy, target-setting, implementation, monitoring, reporting, and disclosure as the necessary steps in a company’s nature-positive journey (9, 10).
These universal, decision-useful metrics should inform board and management discussions, helping companies and investors to address nature-related impacts, de-risk operations and supply chains, increase business resilience and social license to operate, maximize opportunities, and support accountability, recognition, and compliance.
The complexity of measurements and the burden of reporting are among the main reasons, or excuses, cited in the current rollback of environmental policies and regulation in certain regions of the world, notably the US and the EU (11, 12). This fuels the resurgence of narratives that oppose environmental regulation and business competitiveness, pitting environmental protection against economic growth.
With multilateral, regional, and national sustainability institutions and agreements under attack, sustainability policies face an uncertain future. Measuring, in a credible and coherent way, progress towards the Nature Positive goal is crucial for demonstrating the benefits of nature preservation and recovery, as well as the social and economic costs of nature loss. This is also essential to sustain ambition into the next decade as we pass the halfway point and head toward the crucial 2030 milestone, when the next ten-year biodiversity plan will need to be negotiated.
Conclusion
Nature Positive is an existential global goal on which the health and resilience of our society and economy depend. Since it is not a slogan but a measurable goal to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, we need a protocol of universal metrics and standards that are robust yet practical enough to be used by a variety of actors, particularly the private sector to drive and demonstrate nature recovery and to hold each other accountable. Efforts to develop internationally recognized and standardized metrics on pressures and state of nature have been undertaken by several leading organizations (13, 14, 15) with the objective of increasing interoperability across standards and guidance framework. These efforts provide the foundation for a Nature Measurement Protocol that will serve as a key element of the means of implementation essential to fulfil the ambitions codified in the complementary nature-related policy instruments agreed globally, and to mobilize all sectors in society to contribute to a safe, equitable, and nature-positive future.
Copyright statement
Copyright: © 2026 [author(s)]. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in Frontiers Policy Labs is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Generative AI statement
The author declared that generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.
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