NATURE Impacts: National Assessment Tool for Understanding Relative Environmental Impacts

Biodiversity is in crisis, with key indicators showing continued declines in species, ecosystems, and the vital services they provide to humanity. This threatens food security, health, climate stability, and equity, highlighting the deep interconnectedness of nature, climate, and human wellbeing. Despite ambitious global commitments such as the Global Biodiversity Framework, Paris Agreement, and SDGs, progress remains far off track. Addressing this crisis requires more than government pledges, demanding systemic change across business, finance, and production, and, crucially, inclusive, locally led solutions that close the gap between ambition and action.

The aim of this project is to identify high-impact opportunities for nations to help halt and reverse global nature loss by 2030. Building on existing tracking initiatives, ‘NATURE Impacts’ will highlight future priorities and promote evidence-based, bottom-up strategies.

This project will:

• Shift the focus beyond merely assessing whether a nation has fulfilled its commitments, towards identifying the most impactful future actions to maximize positive outcomes for nature.
• Guide stakeholders in understanding not only what they have done but what they must do to achieve the greatest positive impact for nature, rather than only monitor progress against predetermined targets of specific conventions.
• Account for regional differences in priorities and capacities and integrate feedback loops where actions in one region amplify or support outcomes in another, creating a truly interconnected and systemic view of global action.

The pilot stage of this project will involve:

A systematic review to identify existing datasets, trackers, and how they interact with targets across global nature commitments. This will showcase the data currently available, identify gaps in existing knowledge, highlight opportunities for maximum positive impact, and ensure we engage with others working in this space.

A global expert elicitation to demonstrate the potential breadth of the concept. Utilising a large, diverse group of experts, to assess current progress and priorities for all nation-states. This will be presented at the COP in Belém.

The long-term vision is that this pilot project will contribute towards the development of:

An interactive dashboard allowing users to select a country and access comprehensive data on its nature recovery actions, commitments, biodiversity status, and prioritised areas for increased resourcing and ambition.

Country-specific opportunity reports and annual global syntheses in peer-reviewed scientific literature which will also be publicly launched, along with specific calls for action, two months before relevant COPs annually.