The upcoming meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity aims to agree a Global Biodiversity Framework, representing an opportunity to transform humanity's relationship with nature. Restoring nature while meeting human needs requires a bold vision, but this will only succeed if biodiversity conservation can be mainstreamed throughout society. Here, we present a framework that could support this mainstreaming; the Mitigation and Conservation Hierarchy. This places the well-established four-step Mitigation Hierarchy for mitigating and compensating the impacts of developments on biodiversity (Avoid, Minimise, Restore, Offset towards a target such as No Net Loss of biodiversity) within a broader framing that encompasses proactive conservation actions. The Mitigation and Conservation Hierarchy supports both the choice of actions to restore nature and accounting for the effectiveness of those actions, in a consistent manner across sectors and scales. As such it has the potential to guide actions towards a sustainable future for people and nature.