Measuring What Matters: Nature Metrics for a Thriving Bioeconomy
The bioeconomy is increasingly positioned as a pathway to generate economic value while conserving, restoring and sustainably using biodiversity. Yet a fundamental challenge remains: how do we measure whether economic activities are actually creating value from nature while maintaining or improving the natural systems on which they depend?
Current economic and business metrics often fail to capture biodiversity, ecosystem integrity and nature-related dependencies and impacts. At the same time, a proliferation of nature metrics, frameworks and disclosure approaches risks creating complexity without necessarily providing the practical signals needed by governments, businesses, investors and communities.
At CBD COP17, this event will bring together the Bioeconomy Challenge, governments, business, finance, science and civil society to explore how a more coherent approach to nature metrics can support the transition from bioeconomy ambition to implementation. The discussion will examine which metrics are most useful for different decision-makers; how they can connect ecological outcomes with economic value and investment decisions; and how emerging approaches can support implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
Key questions
What should we measure? Which indicators can credibly demonstrate that bioeconomic activities contribute to biodiversity, ecosystem resilience and regeneration?
How do metrics become decision tools? How can nature metrics inform business strategy, public policy, investment and market development rather than becoming primarily a reporting exercise?
Can greater convergence unlock scale? Where is alignment needed across biodiversity metrics, economic valuation, corporate frameworks and finance to create clearer signals for a nature-positive bioeconomy?
What can the Bioeconomy Challenge contribute? How can its work on metrics, markets, finance and sociobioeconomy help connect global frameworks with practical implementation?