There is growing awareness among businesses, financial institutions and policy-makers of the risks posed by the global decline of biodiversity, and opportunities for positive action. In response, a complex landscape of metrics, tools and frameworks has been developed to measure and value the impacts and dependencies of business on biodiversity and associated ecosystem services, as part of wider natural capital assessment and accounting processes. There is an urgent need to provide an agreed set of principles and technical criteria setting out ‘what’ elements of biodiversity should be measured and valued and ‘how’ this should be done in different decision-making contexts. These recommendations from the Aligning accounting approaches for nature (Align) project have been designed to address this need and support wider reporting, disclosure and target setting initiatives and standards.