It's a sign of how quickly expectations are shifting regarding biodiversity.

The term 'nature positive' wasn't mentioned in Graeme Samuel's review of the EPBC Act completed in late 2020. But the concept lies at the heart of Ken Henry's recommendations for overhauling NSW's Biodiversity Conservation Act, released this month, appearing more than 130 times in his report.

"The wellbeing of the people of NSW depends upon a strong policy commitment to 'nature positive'," Henry writes.

"Substantial reform is needed to deliver a nature positive state for NSW," he says. "Nature positive demands a shift in mindset and a willingness to prioritise biodiversity concerns in decision-making."
Of course the absence of the term 'nature positive' in Graeme Samuel's report doesn't mean he ignores the need for nature repair and regeneration.

In fact, Samuel talks repeatedly in his report about the need for "restoration", which amounts to the same thing.

And the term "restoration" finds its way into two of his 38 recommendations – one dealing with biodiversity offsets and another on private investment.

However, in Samuel's report, the term "nature positive' appears in 12 of his 58 recommendations.

These include core recommendations for a statutory, overarching "nature positive strategy" and for measures to ensure other legislation is subservient to a nature positive goal, as well as in his recommendations on biodiversity offsets.

The difference in emphasis between the reviews by Graeme Samuel and Ken Henry is also apparent at the very high level, with Henry proposing that the NSW Act have markedly different objects to those currently in place.

Even though the NSW Act has only operated for five years, its objects "are already obsolete", he writes, proposing that they be amended to commit to an overarching object of nature positive, where biodiversity is protected, restored and improving.

Within that overarching object, he says the NSW Act should commit to:

• halting and reversing biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse
• restoring threatened species and ecosystems, ensuring the ecological and evolutionary
  potential of species and employing a landscape-level focus to building resilience and
  adaptive capacity, especially with respect to climate change
• zero human-induced extinctions of known threatened species
• a standard of net gain in biodiversity.

In contrast, Graeme Samuel was broadly comfortable with the more modest objects of the EPBC Act, which date from 1999 and refer to environmental protection and conservation, but not to restoration and improvement.

Ken Henry's more advanced recognition of what is required should in no way be seen as diminishing the outstanding contribution of the Samuel review. Graeme Samuel's landmark report will finally trigger a much-need comprehensive rewrite of the EPBC Act, underpinned by new, binding national environmental standards.

There is also plenty that their two reviews have in common, with both Ken Henry and Graeme Samuel stunned by the poor administration of the Acts they respectively examined.

There are two important lessons that we can draw from the dramatic reframing of what constitutes good biodiversity policy that has occurred in the time between the release of the Graeme Samuel and Ken Henry reports – a period of just under two years.

The first lesson is that biodiversity policy is evolving far more rapidly than occurred with climate policy.

And the pace of change will only get faster, due to next month's release of the final version of the TNFD disclosure framework for nature impacts and dependencies, as well as the imminent launch of the 'Nature Action 100' international business engagement program.

Secondly, the welcome shift to a strongly 'nature positive' approach underlines the capacity of UN international processes to have an immediate ripple effect, an uplifting result at a time when many are disillusioned by the slow grind of UN global climate change talks.

We know about this ripple effect because a key justification for an overhauled approach given in Ken Henry's report is the need to align with recent global developments, particularly the landmark December 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

At this stage, the recommendations of the Ken Henry review, and indeed the Graeme Samuel review, are just ideas.

And we need to move with urgency to take them beyond that into law and practice.

It may be the case that "ideas live forever", but sadly the same can't be said with certainty about much of our natural environment.