A coalition comprising some of the largest environmental organisations and business groups has banded together to define the term ‘nature positive’, in a bid to clear up its meaning for stakeholders in nature and biodiversity.

Since biodiversity loss has moved up the ESG and political agenda, experts have struggled with ongoing questions of complexity, with the term ‘nature positive’ mooted to take on the politically salient role that ‘net zero’ has played for the 2015 Paris Agreement and wider climate action.

Now, some 27 conservation organisations, institutes, and businesses have banded together to define the term, calling themselves the Nature Positive Initiative (NPI).

The use of ‘nature positive’ has grown in recent years, despite no clear alignment between business, government, and civil society on its meaning, the group said in a statement Wednesday.

Many consultancies and bodies, such as the Science-Based Targets Network (SBTN), have also used the term as a stopgap to shape their activities and rhetoric.

“Companies, consulting firms, universities, agencies, are using the word nature positive, but they’re using it sometimes in a way that doesn’t really reflect the true meaning. Like net zero emissions, nature positive is a measurable goal that needs to be demonstrated in a credible way,” said Marco Lambertini, special envoy of WWF International and convenor of the NPI, at the Reuters Impact conference in London.

The Nature Positive Initiative has a number of influential business coalitions and target-setting frameworks within its core group, including the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and the SBTN, as well as some of the world’s largest environmental organisations such as WWF and IUCN.

“This Initiative is important and critically timed to provide all stakeholders with clarity about what ‘nature positive’ means and how business, finance, and other stakeholders can contribute to the shared global challenge of halting and reversing nature loss with confidence,” said Tony Goldner, executive director of the TNFD, in a statement. The TNFD is separately expected to announce its disclosure recommendations on Sep. 18.

“Alignment is key, this new Initiative will signpost to the key Frameworks and approaches that need to be adopted, highlighting those that are aligned with nature positive and halting and reversing nature loss by 2030,” Lambertini told Carbon Pulse.

Meanwhile, work began on the Nature Positive Initiative in 2019, which aims to lead the world to achieve the highly ambitious target of getting to “nature positive by 2030”, the coalition said.

This goal specifically refers to halting and reversing biodiversity loss by the end of the decade from a 2020 baseline, through measurable gains in the health and resilience of species, ecosystems, and natural processes.

The core group of 27 organisations will set the Nature Positive Initiative’s strategic direction, policy positions, and joint activities.

The body also said it will prioritise the development of the common definition, metrics, and standardised tools that enable all “to appropriately measure and report on their impact and contributions at the actor level”.

“One of the purposes of this new initiative in collaboration with many others is to really come up with a set of metrics, which are good enough to demonstrate the recovery of nature without falling into the trap of measuring things which are almost too difficult to measure,” said Lambertini at the Reuters event.

“The metrics around nature positive, whether it is around species, habitats, processes, needs to be clarified. And this is one of the purposes of the initiative that we launched today,” he added.

It is not clear how the initiative will be financially supported, but it said a “partnership” process will be launched in the coming weeks for relevant institutions and organisations to join and pledge support.

The NPI is focused on broadening the actors involved and will hold a reception at UNGA during New York Climate Week on Sep. 20 to discuss how they will do this, Lambertini told Carbon Pulse. He added that the technical work on aligning frameworks and providing signposting for companies is expected to make progress by COP28.

By Tom Woolnough and Thomas Cox – tom@carbon-pulse.com

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