Guideposts and guardrails for biodiversity accounting in the 21st century

The new Kunming-Montreal Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) calls for transformative change to integrate biodiversity and conservation goals into decision-making across public and private sectors. As a result, biodiversity accounting approaches, which reduce the multifaceted complexity of nature to quantitative metrics for practical applications, are proliferating rapidly. These approaches will be essential for implementing growing practices like nature-based solutions, corporate biodiversity stewardship, no net loss policies, and sustainable infrastructure development. In this perspectives article, we identify ten considerations for biodiversity accounting to ground ongoing discourse in sound ecological science and to better integrate biodiversity into societal decision-making. These considerations pertain to three processes within biodiversity accounting: (1) selecting biodiversity targets, facets, indicators, and metrics, (2) tool and framework design, and (3) implementation. For each consideration, we highlight desirable attributes or practices, which we call “guideposts”, and cautionary notes demarcating problems to be avoided, or “guardrails”. These help to delineate the safe design space for creators and users of biodiversity accounting systems to avoid unintended consequences and reduce risks of failing to achieve conservation objectives via misuse or ineffective approaches. Major considerations include the need for careful disclosure of effort and statistical uncertainty, interoperability and flexibility of frameworks, careful justification and explanation of selected facets, metrics, and indicators, and attention to local social and ecological context. Consideration of these guideposts and guardrails could help avoid unintended consequences like accelerated biodiversity loss and exacerbated environmental injustice while providing a practical basis for achieving the sustainable futures envisioned in the GBF.