Mobilizing strong sustainability indicators to achieve global durability goals

While the GBF and the SDGs pursue a vision of maintaining natural capital at a level that allows for sustainable socio- economic development, their monitoring systems do not use strong sustainability indicators that guarantee this vision. From a strong sustainability perspective, environmental sustainability requires identifying the elements of natural capital to be preserved (critical natural capital) and defining the level at which they should be preserved (sustainability reference values). In this line, Usubiaga-Liaño and Ekins (2021a) proposed two criteria to assess whether an indicator set represents the strong sustainability perspective. First, indica-tors of strong sustainability (the annual quantities of woody biomass harvested from forests, for example) need to be related to the functions of natural capital (e.g. the capacity of forest ecosystems to maintain biomass production), since strong sustainability requires the functions of critical natural capital to be maintained over time. Second, the indicators need to have a sustainability reference value against which performance can be compared that reflects the conditions under which those functions are maintained (the maximum sustainable yield of biomass production from forests, for our example).