Murray Hogarth at the Global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney for The Fifth Estate. It turns out that we humans are very good at measuring the harm we do to nature, but have very little ability to accurately measure and agree on any positive impacts towards its repair, restoration and regeneration, he hears.
This is a big problem when you follow the long-established business guiding principle that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, because investors won’t commit funding to the “unmeasurable”, no matter how good or noble the ideas sound.
One expert delegate at the summit described the lack of an agreed basis for measurement as a “glaring, gaping chasm” in the corporate and investment response to nature, saying: “The ultimate question is, how do we know if it is working, and we haven’t really had an answer to that.”
Now a major new multi-stakeholder collaboration is out to fix that with “metrics”, which it is calling The State of Nature Metrics Framework, proposing both universal and case-specific metrics, at species and ecosystem levels, covering “living nature” across land, freshwater and sea.
This metrics initiative has launched its consultation phase at the first-ever Global Nature Positive Summit, hosted by the Australian and NSW governments, and held in Sydney 8-9 October.
It will now fast-track its draft plans via an international road tour that will culminate with the next World Economic Forum gathering in January 2025, famously known as “Davos” after the Swiss town where the annual summit takes place.
After kicking off its engagement at Climate Week in New York in September, with over 140 organisations, and then launching its consultations in Sydney this week, the initiative moves on to UN COP16 biodiversity conference in Columbia later this month, the UN COP29 global climate summit in Azerbaijan in November, and the UNCCD “Our Land. Our Future” COP16 in Saudi Arabia in December, before finally reaching Davos.
A tree is only valuable when it is cut down and sold, a fish when it lands on your dish
Its founder and driving force, Marco Lambertini, a former director-general of WWF International, presented on multiple occasions at the Sydney summit.
He told a summit plenary on Wednesday that the economy currently only values nature when it is dead, saying: “A tree is only valuable when it is cut down and sold, a fish when it lands on your dish. We don’t put a price on nature, and it’s not about putting a price on nature, we [need to] put a value on nature that is able to compete with the destructive forces of the mainstream economic system of today.”
Lambertini said the metrics initiative aimed to be broadly useful across multiple users and use cases, including corporate, investment, government and other land managers, saying: “metrics of living elements of nature (biodiversity) are key to verify whether ultimately nature is in recovery or decline.”