Nature-Positive for Industrial Facilities: An Environmental Management Framework for Biodiversity Stewardship

Biodiversity has become an increasingly important concern in environmental management, yet the meaning of nature-positive remains unstable when applied to the management of industrial facilities. Site managers are increasingly expected to demonstrate contributions to biodiversity improvement beyond compliance, but practical guidance remains limited on what facilities can credibly implement, maintain, measure, and communicate. This article addresses this management problem through a structured critical review of the literature across six connected domains: nature-positive, no net loss and net gain approaches, the mitigation hierarchy and biodiversity offsetting, biodiversity measurement and reporting, environmental management systems (EMS), and industrial and SME implementation contexts. To improve transparency, the review is organised around an explicit, theme-led search and analytical coding process focusing on definitions, netting logic, controllability, measurement, governance mechanisms, and reporting implications. The review identifies four recurrent tensions that constrain facility-scale biodiversity stewardship: ambiguity between nature-positive as a societal goal and as a site-level claim; the methodological fragility of net-outcome claims at facility scale; limited managerial control over ecological outcomes; and weak persistence when biodiversity actions are not embedded in operational routines. Based on these findings, the paper develops Nature-Positive for Industrial Facilities (NP4IF) as a facility-scale implementation architecture for biodiversity stewardship. NP4IF specifies a PDCA-compatible sequence linking site assessment, prioritisation of controllable interventions, operational integration, two-layer monitoring, governance review, reporting discipline, and adaptive management. Its distinctive contribution is to translate nature-positive ambition into a bounded management process in which facilities are accountable for implemented and maintained actions, while ecological signals are interpreted cautiously in light of partial controllability and wider landscape dynamics. The article offers an internationally relevant, practice-oriented framework for industrial facilities and provides a more credible basis for environmental management than abstract net-outcome claims alone.