New Global Index Proposed to Measure Nations’ Relationship With Nature

The world is on the verge of a critical moment—we must act to conserve natural resources before they are completely depleted. A new research initiative aims to halt the escalating planetary crisis before it becomes unmanageable. As global efforts to protect the environment gain momentum, a team of researchers from the Environmental Change Institute and the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme, has proposed a hopeful and practical new approach. They introduce the Nature Relationship Index (NRI)—a tool designed to measure national progress toward building mutually beneficial relationships between people and the natural world, in ways that are meaningful and widely understood.

It will be an open-ended process informed by expert consultation, international concept testing and indicator development, the NRI could help to incentivise progress towards a world in which humanity thrives together with the rest of life on Earth. "We explore the challenges and opportunities of developing a robust NRI and invite broader participation to facilitate this development in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report", the researchers say in the report.

It says that clear and sustained gains in human development have been achieved in most nations since the HDI was introduced in 19909. Yet progress towards reducing the environmental harm caused by industrial economies—a notable international and national priority even then9—has been limited at best.

To motivate more effective action towards a world where people and nature thrive together, we propose an aspirational framework sup-ported by an index analogous to the HDI—a Nature Relationship Index (NRI)—that broadens the aspirations of human development to include progress towards better human relationships with the rest of the natural world, of which we are a vital part. "We build the case for this approach with evidence that human aspirations have motivated mutually ben-eficial relationships with nature in the past and continue to do so today in many contexts", explains the paper.

What Is NRI
Like the HDI, the NRI is proposed as an aggregate index computed from multiple indicators to measure and monitor progress—and lack of pro-gress—across the world’s nations.

As per the paper, to develop a method for calculating the Nature Relationship Index (NRI), the researchers conducted an informal horizon scan of existing indicators. This involved reviewing academic literature and drawing from national, regional, and international datasets, including those related to the Sustainable Development Goals and other global frameworks.

The team then established selection criteria and created a test version of the NRI using a set of example indicators that met those benchmarks. These indicators were normalized on a scale from 0 to 1, and then grouped into dimension indices, which were averaged to produce the final NRI estimate. Where necessary, certain indicators were inverted to ensure that higher values consistently reflected greater progress—similar to the methodology used in the Human Development Index (HDI).

The use of simple normalisation and unweighted averaging helped keep the process transparent and easy to interpret, though the paper notes this sometimes led to skewed or clustered distributions. Crucially, by normalizing metrics across countries, the NRI is designed to highlight relative national performance—rewarding nations that show strong improvement and discouraging stagnation, even amid global progress.

The paper says, NRI and its supporting framework are being introduced as a starting point to spark further dialogue and invite broad input. The goal is to refine the NRI ahead of a potential formal release as part of the 2026 Human Development Report.

Like other new indicators featured in the Human Development Report, the development of the NRI will be guided by a global, multi-stakeholder consultation process, shaped through inputs from the HDRO’s statistical and high-level advisory panels. This approach involves targeted thematic consultations across all UN geographic regions to ensure diverse perspectives inform both the report and the metric.

The paper emphasises that the NRI is still a work in progress—one that is empirically grounded and realistic about the unprecedented social and environmental challenges the world faces. Through this consultative, collaborative process, the authors hope to create a useful, globally accepted index supported by experts, scientists, policymakers, and communities alike. The researchers encourage public and expert input to help evolve the NRI into an effective international tool for shaping a more sustainable and equitable future.