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Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is achieved when development projects leave the natural environment in a measurably better state than before. Under the Environment Act 2021, from November 2023, nearly all planning permissions granted in England, except for small sites, will have to include a Biodiversity Gain Plan that demonstrates the development achieves at least 10% Biodiversity Net Gain, as measured by the statutory Biodiversity Metric. BNG will be required for small sites from April 2024, and Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) from 2025. This quick guide, designed for use by Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) and developers, provides an easy-to-use checklist to help understand whether submitted Biodiversity Gain Plans are correctly completed, are feasible, and take into account their local ecological and social context.

Conservation area networks in most countries are fragmented and inadequate. To tackle this in England, government policies are encouraging stakeholders to create local-level Nature Recovery Networks. Here we describe work led by a wildlife organisation that used the systematic conservation planning approach to identify a Nature Recovery Network for three English counties and select focal areas within it where they will focus their work. The network was based on identifying core zones to maintain current biodiversity and recovery zones for habitat restoration, meeting area-based targets for 50 priority habitat, landscape, landcover and ecosystem service types. It included the existing designated sites for conservation, which cover 6.05% of the study site, and identified an additional 11.6% of land as core zones and 18% as recovery zones, reflecting the organisation’s broad objective of conserving and connecting 30% of England by 2030. We found that systematic conservation planning worked well in this context, identifying a connected, adequate, representative and efficient network and producing transparent and repeatable results. The analysis also highlighted the pressing need for government agencies to provide national-level guidance and datasets for setting targets and including species data in spatial planning, creating a national framework to inform local action.

Biodiversity declines threaten the sustainability of global economies and societies. Acknowledging this, businesses are beginning to make commitments to account for and mitigate their influence on biodiversity, and report this in sustainability reports. The top 100 of the 2016 Fortune 500 Global companies' (the Fortune 100) sustainability reports were assessed to gauge the current state of corporate biodiversity accountability. Many companies acknowledged biodiversity, but corporate biodiversity accountability is in its infancy. Almost half (49) of the Fortune 100 mentioned biodiversity in reports, and 31 made clear biodiversity commitments, of which only 5 could be considered specific, measureable and time?bound. A variety of biodiversity?related activities were disclosed (e.g., managing impacts, restoring biodiversity, and investing in biodiversity), but only 9 companies provided quantitative indicators to verify the magnitude of their activities (e.g., area of habitat restored). No companies reported quantitative biodiversity outcomes, making it difficult to determine whether business actions were of sufficient magnitude to address impacts, and are achieving positive outcomes for nature. Conservation science can help advance approaches to corporate biodiversity accountability through developing science?based biodiversity commitments, meaningful indicators, and more targeted activities to address business impacts. With the “biodiversity policy super?year” of 2020 rapidly approaching, now is the time for conservation scientists to engage with and support businesses to play a critical role in setting the new agenda for a sustainable future for the planet, with biodiversity at its heart.

A workshop held at the University of Cambridge in May 2017 brought developers, researchers, knowledge brokers, and users together to discuss user-centred design of decision support tools. Decision support tools are designed to take users through logical decision steps towards an evidence-informed final decision. Although they may exist in different forms, including on paper, decision support tools are generally considered to be computer- (online, software) or app-based. Studies have illustrated the potential value of decision support tools for conservation, and there are several papers describing the design of individual tools. Rather less attention, however, has been placed on the desirable characteristics for use, and even less on whether tools are actually being used in practice. This is concerning because if tools are not used by their intended end user, for example a policy-maker or practitioner, then its design will have wasted resources. Based on an analysis of papers on tool use in conservation, there is a lack of social science research on improving design, and relatively few examples where users have been incorporated into the design process. Evidence from other disciplines, particularly human-computer interaction research, illustrates that involving users throughout the design of decision support tools increases the relevance, usability, and impact of systems. User-centred design of tools is, however, seldom mentioned in the conservation literature. The workshop started the necessary process of bringing together developers and users to share knowledge about how to conduct good user-centred design of decision support tools. This will help to ensure that tools are usable and make an impact in conservation policy and practice.

Article impact statement: New collaborations with accounting research can improve conservation impact of ecosystem-based information systems.

Engagement with diverse social science disciplines is essential to revealing political, social, and institutional challenges that must be addressed to advance effective biodiversity conservation (Bennett et al. 2017; Teel et al. 2018). One challenge that remains insufficiently investigated is frustration with the lack of impact of innovative information tools and systems of accounts aimed at motivating and guiding ecosystem management. The conservation community invests considerable efforts in their creation and experimentation. However, ecosystem-based tools do not always lead to the changes in decision, action, or policy conser- vation scientists expect (e.g., Ruckelshaus et al. 2015). Often, the inability of such information systems to gen- erate expected changes is not due to technical limitations rather than the too fragile articulation between their de- sign and the complex realities of developing strategies and organizing management of ecosystems in a diversity of contexts. Investigating such articulation between an information system and the organizational details of its systematic use is precisely what characterizes an aca- demic field: accounting, which belongs to management as a discipline and often intersects with social sciences or economics.