The Challenge: Measuring Nature at Scale

Before partnering with NatureHelm, New Forests found it difficult to quantify the state of nature across their vast and diverse landholdings and the surrounding landscapes. They were also curious to discover what nature-positive indicators may mean for their business, and how they could be applied across millions of hectares globally.

Key challenges included:

• Lack of Consistency & Comparability: Traditional methods made it difficult to measure and compare the ecological health of a forest in Africa with one in the United States or Australia.
• High Costs at Portfolio scale: Using ground-based surveys alone (like manual bird counts or camera traps) over millions hectares was prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.
• Understanding what to prioritise: With millions of hectares of assets dispersed around the world, each with different species, ecosystems and management contexts, it was very difficult to know what and where to prioritise actions without metrics that can be compared across the portfolio.
• Communication Gaps: They needed a way to translate complex ecological data from specific assets into clear visuals and metrics at the portfolio level that all stakeholders—from local property managers to regional partners and investors—could easily grasp.
• Investor & Regulatory Pressure: With investors increasingly mandating demonstrable progress towards nature-related targets for their sustainable investment portfolios, New Forests needed to find a more efficient, standardised way to prove their credentials at scale. They were also faced with increasing demands for more sophisticated and rigorous reporting to address industry frameworks (eg TNFD, NPI), regulatory requirements (eg SFDR) and certification schemes (eg FSC).
• Ability to collaborate with other regional landholders: addressing nature and biodiversity loss at scale requires collaboration with neighbouring land managers and other regional organisations, such as South Coat Natural Resource Management (SCNRM), which can be a challenge when there isn’t a consistent set of measures.

Industry response: Global Nature Positive Initiative Pilot Program

The global adoption Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022 included the commitment to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.  As a result, the Nature Positive Initiative (NPI) was established to promote the integrity and implementation of the global Nature Positive by 2030 goal.  The NPI represents conservation organisations, and institutes, as well as business and finance coalitions that have come together to drive alignment and support for long-term efforts to deliver nature-positive outcomes.

The NPI 2025 Piloting Program was designed to test and validate a unified set of science-based metrics that can be used by any industry to measure the State of Nature for terrestrial ecosystems.  It focused on enabling companies and financial institutions to measure, report, and set targets for nature-positive outcomes, that can be directly integrated with industry standards and various disclosure and reporting requirements. 

Our Role: Bridging Technology and Ground-Truth

NatureHelm partnered with New Forests to test the application of the NPI guidance across more than 400,000 hectares of assets across five countries to help set the standard for universally applicable State of Nature indicators. We also advanced some aspects of the methods to ensure they directly addressed forestry sector needs. An essential element of this was to provide a platform that could handle the immense scale of their operations while also automating the incorporation of monitoring data on the ground to maintain scientific accuracy and transparency.

1. Integrated Diverse Data Sources: We seamlessly combined a diverse suite of ground-based and remotely sensed (satellite) data at scale. This included millions of aggregated species observations, advanced remote sensing (satellite) data layers and New Forests’ ground-based monitoring data from camera traps, bird surveys, and invasive species management.
2. Advanced Industry Aligned Methods: Our team’s deep biodiversity and data science expertise, together with our scalable geospatial platform, enabled all seven of the NPI Indicators to be calculated across New Forests’ portfolio. We also advanced these methods to ensure indicator scores reflected the condition of assets on the ground by directly linking with land management outcomes. 
3. Impactful Data Visualisations & Reporting: We translated diverse raw data sources into accessible and understandable visualisations that enabled complex biodiversity insights to be clearly communicated to diverse stakeholder groups.  This also enabled New Forests to clearly articulate the different biodiversity values between plantation areas and conservation zones, and effectively “tell the story” of the land in terms of both production and conservation.

“Until now, measuring nature–positive outcomes across our global portfolio has relied on project or species-specific outcomes and has not facilitated a portfolio wide and balanced view. The NPI State of Nature Metrics are changing that, bringing a consistent methodology to compare the state of nature on our assets across time, location and asset type and how our management decisions impact that state. Our participation with NatureHelm and partners in the pilot is just the beginning. While it provided valuable early insights, we can already see opportunities to further improve the data and methodology, and to use the information to drive better decision-making. We look forward to continued collaboration with NatureHelm and other key stakeholders to strengthen the measurement and achievement of positive outcomes at scale,” said Jo Saleeba, Global Head of Sustainability & Impact, New Forests.

The Value Creation & Impact: Data-Driven Success

The successful collaboration provided immediate value to New Forests and demonstrated that NatureHelm’s site-specific State of Nature metrics provide a cost-effective solution that is readily scaled up across global portfolios.  Key value drivers for New Forests included:

• Operational Efficiency & Expertise: For New Forests, calculating these metrics in-house would have been very time and resource intensive,; however NatureHelm’s deep biodiversity, data science and technology expertise enabled the integration, analysis and visualisation of outcomes at scale, creating significant efficiencies in terms of both time and resources.

• Actionable Asset Level Insights: We delivered cost-effective, consistent and actionable nature intelligence via the NPI metrics for New Forests’ assets included in the pilot, as well as across the surrounding catchments for landscape-level context.  This included clear baseline data and the ability to track, manage and report on changes in ecosystem extent, condition and species over time. 
• Connecting Management Actions to Outcomes:   We developed NPI condition metrics that are responsive to both monitoring and management actions on the ground, so New Forests can now see how specific management —such as controlling invasive species—directly correlates to improvements in biodiversity and NPI condition metrics.  This enables New Forests to accurately monitor their impact on nature and adapt management actions to build resilience across both natural and production landscapes.
• Portfolio-Level Risk Management & Reporting: With NatureHelm’s platform, New Forests will have a standardised way to consistently measure and report on positive nature outcomes across their global portfolio annually, supporting comparability and prioritisation. In future, New Forests hopes that the NPI metrics can also support the measurement of growth in ecosystem services, helping to advance natural capital accounting
• Powerful stakeholder communication: By distilling all NPI outcomes into clear data visualisations at both the asset and portfolio levels, our platform enables New Forests’ leadership teams and investors to see the ‘big picture’ at a glance and communicate changes on the State of Nature at asset, investment product, and portfolio levels within a single platform for the first time.  
• Strategic Risk & Opportunity Insights: Catchment-wide connectivity and condition metrics from the pilot provided New Forests with unprecedented landscape-scale biodiversity insights. These findings can not only be used to inform strategic asset acquisition and management, but also provide a technical foundation for collaborative, regional-scale landscape resilience initiatives with external stakeholders.
• Impact Reporting & Disclosures: By mapping the resulting metrics to forestry sector frameworks, we identified opportunities to extract further value from the same data. This confirmed that NPI metrics align seamlessly with diverse investor and regulatory requirements—including SFDR, TNFD, SBTN, FSC certifications, and IFC Performance Standard 6—streamlining reporting across industry standards and financial performance benchmarks.
• New Financial & Natural Capital Opportunities: NatureHelm’s platform enables New Forests to quantify and track natural capital growth across their portfolio with unprecedented transparency. This capability has the potential to unlock new revenue streams for New Forests while signaling a scalable model to drive broader investment into the natural capital asset class.

Industry-wide value: Advancing Natural Capital Markets

By moving from manual, disconnected surveys to NatureHelm’s integrated digital platform, New Forests now have a better understanding of their interface with nature at scale and have  moved beyond managing and monitoring assets in isolation —they are now able to actively quantifying management’s impact on nature globally, mitigate risks, and demonstrate natural asset growth at scale, providing solid foundations for driving future investment into natural capital assets more broadly.

About NatureHelm

NatureHelm is a leading biodiversity intelligence platform that helps companies and financial institutions understand, prioritise, and manage nature-related risks. By translating complex ecological data into actionable insights, NatureHelm enables organisations to drive verifiable, nature-positive change across global value chains. www.naturehelm.com

About New Forests