Polls show the public widely supports protecting biodiversity, but how we get there—or even what a biodiverse future looks like—isn’t as clear.

A new paper led by Odum School of Ecology assistant professor Charles van Rees is helping to chart a path to restoring and saving biodiversity, much like how carbon credits quantify success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Van Rees worked with representatives of a conservation group, private industry, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and colleagues at the University of Georgia on “Guideposts and guardrails for biodiversity accounting in the 21st century” published in the journal Biological Conservation.

Counting carbon, water or energy is more straightforward, and in the past few decades, leaders have created frameworks to account for those non-living objectives of sustainability. Governments and private industries know how to count carbon credits and report on achievements in that area, promoting market-based approaches to meeting environmental goals.

In 2022, representatives of nearly every nation on Earth agreed to the “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework,” which aims to halt and reverse nature loss. The framework sets ambitious targets to safeguard biodiversity and increase sustainability. Since then, there has been a scramble to develop evaluation schemes and tools to support the framework, but little guidance on what constitutes an effective tool.

To address these concerns, van Rees and colleagues set out best practices, problems to avoid, and where to look for answers.

“There is a gigantic and rapidly accelerating discourse on this topic in the literature and in corporate boardrooms. Companies are hiring consultants to start figuring out how to do this. It’s happening simultaneously and everyone’s having their own conversations, often with limited to no coordination. It’s such an interdisciplinary space that voices from many disciplines and backgrounds need to be at the table for us to do this right,” van Rees said.

“So, our idea was to guide this conversation, to put some guardrails around it and then also have some guidelines to point in the right direction. If this conversation is going to happen, it must be grounded in ecological theory and decades of knowledge that have been accumulated by the conservation science community.” 


To help integrate biodiversity and conservation goals into decision-making, van Rees’ team identified 10 focal issues across three processes within biodiversity planning: selecting biodiversity targets, facets, indicators and metrics; designing tools and frameworks; and implementing those tools and frameworks. For each step, they highlighted guardrails (areas of concern) and guideposts (desirable practices).

For example, in designing a framework, practitioners might fail to collect data about what species already live on a site (a guardrail). Instead, it’s important for a plan to capture baseline data through local historical knowledge (guidepost). That baseline data might come from co-creating with local stakeholders who know the value of local species and habitat.

Biodiversity is very specific to context. One species might be important or beneficial in one place, but not in another.

“Having generalizable frameworks is challenging, because you’re leaving out important context,” van Rees said. “You can take a species in one part of China, and it’s endangered and super important. Take the same species and have it show up in Alabama, and it’s an invasive species, and it’s the opposite one you want. It’s the same species, but context is critical.”

Another problem is that biodiversity has lots of dimensions: functional biodiversity, genetic biodiversity, ecosystem biodiversity, behavioral diversity and more.

Then, scientists have to decide what scale is appropriate to measure. Is a single habitat the right size, or should the measure stretch across an entire continent? All of these things can change depending on the decisions being made, and the decision-makers themselves.

“Biodiversity just has so many aspects, and most frameworks only measure one or two. Then there are logistical limitations, like time and funding to implement the framework,” he said.

The key to creating and achieving meaningful biodiversity goals, van Rees said, is choosing many metrics. Like the pixels in a photo, the more points you have, the clearer the picture.

The goal of his team’s guardrails and guideposts paper is to point out some actionable ways forward through the complexity of biodiversity accounting. 

“This is the start of what we hope will be a growing effort around biodiversity accounting at the Odum School, in support of market applications for businesses and for strengthening evidence-based implementation for conservation, restoration and nature-based solutions,” van Rees said. “The idea is to build something that is useful to corporate partners as well as colleagues in the public sector.

“If somebody was looking to be as responsible, inclusive, broad thinking as possible in their biodiversity accounting practices, this should give them a good start,” he said.

Co-authors include Suman Jumani (former Odum School postdoc) of the Nature Conservancy, Vratika Chaudhary of Proctor and Gamble, UGA anthropology professor Laura German, Tim Dekker of Limnotech, Kyle McKay (PhD ’14) and Odum professor Seth Wenger.

The work was supported in part by the Network for Engineering with Nature, UGA’s Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems and Center for Integrative Conservation Research, and NASA’s Ecological Conservation program.