30. Can simpler metrics help bring nature back from the brink?

As COP17 reaches its conclusion in Armenia, progress towards meeting a global commitment to halt and reverse nature's decline by 2030 remains off track. To help speed up action, the Nature Positive Initiative has launched a new set of common, global metrics designed to make measuring changes in nature simpler and more consistent for businesses. It boils down more than 600 existing metrics into just four key indicators of nature’s health, which companies can use to better understand their nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities. In this week’s episode, Nick speaks with the initiative’s convener, Marco Lambertini, to explore how nature underpins our social and economic wellbeing, and how food production in particular is entirely dependent on healthy natural systems providing key services like pollination, soil fertility and water storage capability. Marco joins us direct from the conference floor to explain how the new metrics were developed, how they are intended to be used by companies, how they integrate with existing nature standards from the likes of TNFD and SBTi, and why understanding and acting on nature dependencies is fundamental to the future resilience of business models.