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

Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework has driven the development of frameworks to help organisations understand, monitor, and disclose their biodiversity risks and impacts. The growing momentum to standardise and improve corporate nature-related assessments has led to the development of varied guidelines for the use of metrics to measure organisations’ pressures, impacts on state-of-nature (SON) and responses. Across these frameworks, pressure and response metrics are relatively well-standardised, while which state-of-nature metric organisations should use to quantify their impact on and exposure to nature degradation remains an open question. In this essay, we review current guidelines for corporate SON measurement and metric selection that have emerged after a first wave of standardisation efforts for corporate disclosures. We identify three key problems that prevent specific recommendation of named SON metrics for a company, given its economic and ecological context. First, unclear and unharmonized applicability and quality criteria have prevented users from having a clear idea of what would describe a suitable metric for their context. Second, a lack of evidence collation and generation has prevented users from evaluating the performance of metrics against these criteria. Third, poor structuring of how criteria are used in the selection process has hindered an intuitive filtration of metrics. We argue that the incipient second wave of standardisation, represented by efforts such as the Nature Measurement Protocol, must produce selection guidance that overcomes these three problems. We discuss how this can be done by: proposing harmonised applicability and quality criteria derived from first-wave frameworks; scaling up evidence gathering for the performance of metrics against criteria; and structuring applicability and quality assessments to direct users towards suitable named metrics, given their context. In resolving these issues, second-wave guidance frameworks can help scale up the rate of disclosures of state-of-nature metrics towards achieving Target 15 by 2030.