Four numbers to settle the greenwashing question

illuminem summarises the essential news of the day. For a decade, companies have promised to protect nature without any agreed way to prove it. Now, three of the most influential bodies in corporate sustainability, the Nature Positive Initiative, TNFD and SBTN, have aligned on the clearest answer yet to the question that has dogged corporate biodiversity efforts: is any of it working? Read the full guidance here, or explore illuminem’s exclusive coverage below.

Three of the organisations that shape how companies assess and report their effect on the natural world have agreed a common way to measure whether nature is recovering or declining, in an attempt to make a decade of corporate biodiversity pledges verifiable.

The Nature Positive Initiative, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) published coordinated updates on 13 October, built around a shared foundation: the State of Nature Indicators and Metrics, a set of measurements for the condition of nature itself. The releases come days before governments convene at the UN biodiversity summit, COP17, in Yerevan, Armenia.

The guidance addresses a long-standing weakness in corporate nature reporting. Companies have become adept at tracking their pressures on nature, such as water drawn or land cleared, and their responses, such as hectares restored or money committed. What they have lacked is a consistent way to measure the outcome, meaning whether the ecosystems in question are improving or still deteriorating. The gap has allowed firms to report extensive activity without demonstrating any effect on the ground, a charge frequently levelled at corporate biodiversity programmes.

The new framework distils more than 600 existing state-of-nature metrics, whose proliferation the sponsors blame for years of confusion and inaction, into four core indicators: ecosystem extent, whether habitats are expanding or shrinking; ecosystem condition, whether their quality is rising or falling; species extinction risk, how much a site matters to global extinction risk; and species populations, how healthy the species present are. The indicators are designed for use across land, freshwater and marine environments, at both site and landscape scale.

The Nature Positive Initiative, an alliance of 27 conservation groups, standard-setters and business platforms, developed the metrics over two years, drawing on more than 500 experts, two public consultations and pilots at 29 companies across six sectors, 50-plus sites and 23 countries. Technical partners included EY, The Biodiversity Consultancy, the World Economic Forum and the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance.

The measurement base was released alongside upgrades to the two frameworks most companies already use. TNFD issued version 2.0 of its LEAP assessment approach, its first major revision since 2023, adding state-of-nature measurement and new guidance on risk, environmental crime and financial-institution portfolios. SBTN published Science-Based Targets for Nature 2.0, offering companies more flexible entry points and wider coverage of freshwater and land while retaining its place-based methodology. Both have embedded the four indicators, allowing a company to carry one measurement basis from assessment through target-setting to disclosure rather than reconciling rival metrics at each stage.

Uptake extends further. The Global Reporting Initiative is moving towards integration; the International Sustainability Standards Board has drawn on TNFD material for a nature-disclosure draft expected shortly; several multilateral development banks are referencing the indicators in their own guidance; and the metrics can feed disclosures under the EU’s ESRS E4 standard.

“Until now there has been no clear consensus on how to measure whether efforts are leading to nature’s recovery,” said Marco Lambertini, leading illuminem Voice and convener of the Nature Positive Initiative. He said the indicators “plug a critical gap,” giving businesses and financial institutions “a practical, science-based and universally applicable way” to judge whether their actions are putting nature on a path to recovery while building their own resilience.

Tony Goldner, Chief Executive of TNFD, said the stronger alignment between the frameworks would help organisations “build on existing work and draw on a common foundation,” calling it “an important step towards making corporate action on nature more practical, coherent and scalable.”

The timing reflects mounting pressure. Fewer than four years remain to meet the international goal of halting and reversing nature loss by 2030, and the releases are intended to support Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls on governments to require large companies and financial institutions to assess and disclose their impacts and dependencies on nature. The initiative’s backers note that business and society now operate outside seven of the nine planetary boundaries scientists use to define a safe operating space for humanity.

Whether the framework changes corporate behaviour will depend on adoption. Lambertini said the case for action was now clear: “There can be no more delay in addressing the decline of nature. The next step is measurable action.”

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