New partnership delivers ‘most expansive’ Nature Positive Initiative pilot globally

New Forests has partnered with NatureHelm to scale nature intelligence in support of the delivery of nature positive outcomes and emerging natural capital financial opportunities.

New Forests, a Sydney-based investment manager focused on nature-based solutions, has announced the delivery of what it describes as the world’s “most expansive” Nature Positive Initiative (NPI) pilot project. 

NPI is a collaboration between the world’s largest nature conservation organisations, indigenous forums, institutes, and business and finance coalitions, launched in 2023 to support longer-term efforts to deliver nature positive outcomes in line with the global goal to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030 on a 2020 baseline, and achieve full recovery by 2050.

The pilot project, which involved calculating seven state of nature metrics in accordance with NPI guidelines across more than 400,000 hectares in Australia, the United States, and Africa, is the result of a partnership between New Forests and biodiversity intelligence platform NatureHelm aimed at standardising New Forests’ nature measurement and providing greater transparency across its nature-based investment portfolio. The platform leverages biodiversity expertise with big data and machine learning.

New Forests said the partnership would help to scale nature intelligence to support the delivery of nature positive outcomes and emerging natural capital financial opportunities, as well as respond to rising demand from global investors for sophisticated, comparable data to meet their ESG and impact reporting requirements. This includes reporting against the Taskforce on Nature related Financial Disclosure (TNFD) framework’s recommendations.

Debbie Saunders, co-founder and CEO of NatureHelm, commented: “By providing a standardised lens through which business operations can be linked directly to biodiversity extent, condition and species across millions of hectares, we are enabling the financial sector to move from ambition to actionable, risk-adjusted investment in the planet’s future.”

Pilot project

The pilot project, which was rolled out between April and October 2025 in the US, Australia, Tanzania, Mozambique and Uganda, analysed a diverse range of forest assets managed by New Forests, as well as agricultural landscapes within Western Australia’s South Coast Natural Resource Management’s Frankland region, which is managed by a community-based, independent, not-for-profit organisation. It also analysed nature metrics across more than 34.8 million hectares surrounding the targeted assets.  

New Forests said NatureHelm’s solution responded to a long-standing industry challenge of quantifying the state of nature and associated impacts at scale without prohibitive costs, while also providing a strong foundation for natural capital accounting.

Users of the platform can connect specific management activities, such as invasive species control and habitat restoration, to measurable state of nature improvements. New Forests said this data-driven approach enables comparability and prioritisation across diverse geographies and has the potential to support the monetisation of nature. 

The partners are now looking to expand this work across New Forests’ global asset portfolio covering 4.4 million hectares.

State of Nature Metrics

Jo Saleeba, global head of sustainability and impact at New Forests, said that until now, to measure nature-positive outcomes across its global portfolio, the firm has relied on project or species-specific outcomes, which did not afford a portfolio wide and balanced view.

She explained that the NPI’s state of nature metrics are changing that, referring to the two-year consensus building process to create a standardised basket of metrics aimed at investors, corporates and government actors, which is expected to be finalised and published this year. She said this would bring a consistent methodology to compare the state of nature on the company’s assets across time, location and asset type and understand how its management decisions impact that state.

“One of the greatest challenges our industry faces is how to measure, compare and report the state of nature consistently across large, diverse portfolios – and do so in a way that is credible, decision‑useful, and meaningful for investors,” said Saleeba, explaining to Impact Investor that a key reason for being involved in this pilot was to test the state of nature metrics to ensure they were feasible for forestry and other nature-based assets, as well as across broader landscapes and different geographies.

“We used NatureHelm’s platform to facilitate the measurement of the state of nature metrics at scale in a manner that was commercially viable while also having the ability to connect with asset management activities and decision-making,” she added.