The emergence of never before seen or ‘novel’ ecological states is rising quickly. New combinations of species, climates and community structure occur everywhere, yet there is currently no globally accepted indicator for rigorously identifying the novelty of ecosystems or sites over time—based on historical (years to decades) changes in community composition—even though such data are globally widespread. However, robust approaches to quantifying ecological novelty have been recently developed, allowing for broad spatial and temporal scale ecological comparisons. Currently there is no standardised way for countries to quantify temporal change in the species composition of ecosystems, much less for natural resource managers to report on ecological novelty from individual countries. The Biodiversity Indicators Partnership (BIP) is the global clearing house for biodiversity support tools and indicators used for attaining the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi and post-2020 GBF targets. Here I explore the potential for the development of a biodiversity indicator toolkit based on ecological novelty, incorporating with, and complementing existing, BIP indicators. Such a toolkit would provide countries with the opportunity to incorporate time-series data on species composition and environments into global reporting structures to evaluate, monitor and manage biodiversity to help achieve global environmental goals and targets.