On 12th December 2013, Measure What Matters hosted a High Level Roundtable discussion at St James’s Palace, London.

The Roundtable brought together 20 leaders from business, research and policy to discuss the potential for aligning sustainability data at different levels of decision making.

The discussion raised a number of key points:

- Business and governments agree on the urgent need for greater alignment between sustainability reporting frameworks.

- There are numerous initiatives underway at the national level. For example, Costa Rica has recently announced a new natural capital law that aims at incorporating the valuation of natural capital in the country’s environmental legislation. The World Bank’s WAVES partnership is also supporting and documenting efforts in over fifty countries and businesses to introduce natural capital valuation.

- There are some useful projects underway aiming to synthesise different datasets, which include the Taskforce for Measuring Sustainable Development (OECD, Eurostat and UNECE) and the Natural Capital Protocol.

- The Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing that was launched at Rio+20 could help to integrate different reporting frameworks at the national and global level.

- The insurance industry has worked on quantifying risks that occur due to natural factors (e.g. climate change effects on man-needed infrastructure). Methods and lessons learned could be shared with business.

- It is critical that all emerging frameworks understand the linkages between natural capital and poverty reduction. When drawing up new measures or estsablishing coherence among existing ones it is important to think of ‘what matters to the individual in a developing country and the individual elsewhere’?