By Noelia García Nebra,
Head of Sustainability and Partnerships, ISO
LinkedIn
At the Villars Institute Ocean Forum in Switzerland, I had the privilege of discussing a crucial issue at the session “Turning Points for Ocean, Glaciers & Poles: Standards, Measurement & Accountability”. The question at the heart of the discussion was simple yet profound: how do we take the incredible volume of scientific data now available and turn it into real-world action to safeguard our oceans, glaciers and polar systems?
Scientific research has never been more sophisticated. Across oceans, glaciers and polar systems, our ability to collect signals, measurements and early-warning insights is accelerating. And yet that progress keeps running into the same bottleneck: not a shortage of data, but a shortage of the shared frameworks needed to act on it.
Two significant hurdles continue to slow our progress. The first is fragmentation in the form of disparate protocols, thresholds and formats that make environmental data notoriously difficult to compare. The second is the limited uptake of frameworks that integrate nature into business, organizational and financial decisions.
Even when the science is crystal clear, action remains inconsistent among companies, investors and policymakers. This is precisely where International Standards become indispensable.
The role of International Standards
A robust suite of International Standards already exists to address these challenges directly within marine and polar systems. These include frameworks for biodiversity and nature integration, such as ISO 17298, and natural capital accounting standards like ISO 14054. From aquaculture and marine species management to water reuse and coastal runoff, these standards provide the technical grounding for environmental data and marine monitoring. Together with environmental management, impact assessment and climate adaptation standards for coastal risks, they form the backbone for turning science into practice.
Standards play a crucial role in decreasing fragmentation by providing consistent protocols and frameworks across different organizations and sectors. They enable replicability, ensuring that data collection methods can be reproduced regardless of location or institution. This uniformity lowers operational costs by reducing redundancies and inefficiencies, streamlining processes, and facilitating a smoother integration of nature into everyday business decisions. Crucially, standards also scale accountability, making it possible to track progress and enforce commitments at every level.
International Standards allow scientific knowledge to travel. They carry insight out of research and into practice, and from practice into systems that can scale.
The conveyor that carries science into action
Tom Hale’s conveyor model offers a helpful lens for understanding why standards matter. Developed to explain net-zero governance, it suggests that lasting change rarely comes from a single breakthrough or policy alone. It happens when voluntary action, coordination, standards and regulation begin to reinforce one another. From this perspective, International Standards allow scientific knowledge to travel. They carry insight out of research and into practice, and from practice into systems that can scale. In marine and polar contexts, that matters enormously.
The sooner credible science gets on to that conveyor, the faster it can become embedded in institutions, reflected in markets and translated into policy. Shared standards for data, monitoring and nature management help good ideas spread and strong practice become the norm.
Once those standards begin to shape finance, supply chains and government decisions, they stop being background infrastructure and start becoming drivers of system-wide change. That is how science becomes action, and how action, over time, becomes transformation.
The path forward requires a collective commitment to advancing these shared approaches. We must ask ourselves: what specific needs can be addressed through further standardization? Where do we still see gaps in the existing frameworks? By identifying the areas within our field that most need standardization, we can better share data, scale our solutions and support genuine accountability.
Building on the discussions at the Villars Institute Ocean Forum, we invite the global community to work together to overcome the challenges of implementation. By aligning our methods today, we ensure that the scientific insights of the present become the accountable actions of the future.