Human Development / Nature / Metrics / Global Policy

Human Development with Nature

Measuring progress in societies' relationships with nature

0Proposed dimensions

0Human Development Report expected to feature the Nature Relationship Index

Executive summary

Most frameworks for humanity’s relationship with nature focus on the damage. The authors of a 2025 Nature paper argue that casting people mainly as destroyers of nature has fed political polarization and eco-anxiety, without inspiring action on the scale needed.

Inspired by the Human Development Index (HDI), which ranks countries on health, education and living standards, UNDP’s Human Development Report Office (HDRO) is developing a Nature Relationship Index (NRI). It would rank countries on how far they have come toward relationships with nature that benefit both people and the rest of the living world, making doing better by nature something countries aspire to.

Key proposition: The NRI takes an aspirational approach. It would encourage countries to improve through the standing that comes with higher rankings, not through targets or limits. As with the HDI, a higher score is meant to signal more progress toward a world where people and nature thrive together.

“Let us be clear: the pursuit of progress has often led humans to be destroyers of nature. But they don't have to be so.”

Pedro Conceição

Director, Human Development Report Office, UNDP, in Geneva Policy Outlook (2026)

Who's behind this

The paper, “An aspirational approach to planetary futures”, has 19 authors. Erle Ellis of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is first author. Ellis, Conceição, Pasanen and Yadvinder Malhi of the University of Oxford initiated and led the work. Hannah Ritchie led the indicator work with Depsky and Samira Barzin. Jasper Montana led the concept testing with Susan Clayton, Krushil Watene, Melissa Leach, Bojie Fu and CHP's Founding President, Michael Muthukrishna. The writing was led by Ellis, Leach, David Obura, Sandra Díaz, Emma Marris and Malhi.

Where the NRI fits

The NRI would join other measures HDRO has added since the first Human Development Report introduced the HDI in 1990. The 2020 report, The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene, asked how countries could continue human development while easing planetary pressures. It introduced the experimental planetary pressures-adjusted HDI (PHDI).

PHDI

The PHDI adjusts a country's HDI for carbon dioxide emissions and material footprint per person. Material footprint counts the raw materials extracted to meet a country's consumption. As those pressures rise, the PHDI falls further below the HDI.

Environmental targets

Most current responses to nature's decline set targets or limits on human harm. The NRI's authors credit these targets with identifying and publicizing harm to nature and people. But they argue that the same framing has had costs of its own, including rights dispossessions of Indigenous peoples.

The NRI's alternative

Rather than setting limits, the NRI builds on what people want for their lives. Its authors cite evidence that those aspirations have led people to look after nature in the past, and still do in many places.

Three proposed dimensions

Like the HDI, the NRI would combine three dimensions into one number. Each dimension would be measured by one or more national indicators. The authors warn that indicators could reward poverty, inequality or the export of environmental harm to other countries.

What each dimension asks

Nature is thriving and accessible
How much space do people have to enjoy nature safely, and how much habitat do wild species have?
Nature is used with care
Do societies use forests, wild fish, air and rivers in ways that leave them in the same or better condition for people and the rest of the living world?
Nature is safeguarded
How much public money do societies spend on keeping water, air and the living world safe and healthy, including endangered species? What legal protections do they provide?

“Being too poor to harm nature is no aspiration.”

Erle Ellis and 18 co-authors

An aspirational approach to planetary futures, Nature (2025)

How the index could be used

Aims stated by HDRO and the paper's authors

Track each country's relationship with nature through regular updates, as the HDI does
Compare each country's NRI score with its HDI score
Raise the scores of countries that invest in shared spaces for people and nature, in clean air and water, and in restoring ecosystems
Give countries what HDRO calls “an evidence-based reference point” for decisions about sustainability

Where the work stands

Who is developing it

UNDP's Human Development Report Office. Its statistical and high-level advisory panels will guide a global consultation that informs the final index.

Expected release

The 2026 Human Development Report, Towards Peace with Nature: Nurturing the Foundations of Human Development

Before the Nature paper was published, its authors held 35 concept-testing interviews with members of the public in China, Egypt, India, Peru, Poland and the United States. The interviews led them to rename one dimension from “Nature is supported” to “Nature is safeguarded” and to change other terms.

The authors also built a test index from existing data as a proof of concept, to show the calculation could be done. Too few national indicators had data with global coverage and annual updates for a final version.

In early 2026, HDRO was testing whether the three dimensions were easy to understand and communicate, and had begun identifying indicators for each. The final indicators have not yet been published.

“Lofty ideas of progress, no matter how they are defined, rarely go anywhere without another important ingredient: metrics to assess changes over time and to evaluate relative performance across jurisdictions.”

Pedro Conceição

Director, Human Development Report Office, UNDP, in Geneva Policy Outlook (2026)

How the index connects to CHP's work

CHP defines progress as expanding people's real freedoms to live lives they value. That definition and the NRI both draw on the human development tradition behind the Human Development Reports.
CHP studies the human side of progress, including why good ideas stall and what helps them take hold. The NRI's authors note that the ozone layer is recovering after international bans on ozone-depleting chemicals. They add that water and air pollution, including acid rain, have proved largely resolvable where regulation and investment were adequate. Efforts on the climate and biodiversity crises, they write, have made only modest progress.
Protecting nature requires cooperation between people and between countries. Cooperation sustains itself when people expect others to do their part, and CHP studies how those expectations form and change.

“Connecting with the common aspirations of people may be the only way to generate the scales of cooperation needed to end the nature crisis and shape a better future for all.”

Erle Ellis and 18 co-authors

An aspirational approach to planetary futures, Nature (2025)

Published by Center for Human Progress (US) Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization