A Nature‐positive World is More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Adoption of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM‐GBF) has led to further growth in attention being directed to the challenge of bending the curve of biodiversity loss to achieve a nature‐positive world. However, concerns have been raised that, unless progress towards achieving net gain in biodiversity can be measured effectively at a whole‐system level, the term ‘nature‐positive’ risks becoming no more than a convenient label for any action intended to benefit nature. Biodiversity is complex, and initiatives promoting and informing the measurement of biodiversity change usually address this complexity by employing separate metrics to assess different biodiversity levels and entities, and different causal‐framework components (responses, pressures, state and benefits). As a consequence, assessing achievement of nature positive at a whole‐system level is challenged by the reality that these various components do not exist or function in isolation from one another but are instead connected and interact in a myriad of ways. More integrative biodiversity indicators can complement and add significant value to the use of simpler metrics by helping to account for: (i) major sources of non‐additivity in the way that biodiversity itself, and the consequences of actions impacting biodiversity, scale from local to whole‐system level as a function of compositional variation and ecological interactions within and between discrete biological entities (e.g. species and ecosystem types); and (ii) complexities in how multiple pressures (e.g. climate and land‐use change) and multiple management responses (e.g. protection and restoration) combine in shaping outcomes for biodiversity. Integrative indicators incorporating a predictive capability also offer considerable potential to more strongly couple monitoring of actions implemented under the KM‐GBF targets to monitoring of outcomes achieved under that framework's goals. In addition, these same indicators can more effectively link monitoring to planning of further actions, which can most effectively and efficiently advance progress towards bending the curve of biodiversity loss, across both public and private sectors.