The Biodiversity Consultancy Champions Sustainable Finance at Building Bridges 2024

At the 2024 Building Bridges conference in Geneva, from December 10th to 12th, The Biodiversity Consultancy was pivotal in advancing the dialogue on aligning financial flows with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement. 

The Biodiversity Consultancy’s Strategic Director-Nature Finance, Samantha Lacey and Technical Director-Nature Finance, Grant Rudgley, joined the conference this year.  

At the conference, the global socio-political challenges, including the rise of some anti-ESG politicians in different parts of the world with the potential to roll back some climate policies and greenwashing concerns, were acknowledged as creating challenges for progress. 

However, despite these headwinds, there was broad optimism about the unstoppable momentum within the private sector to drive environmental action. Positive regulatory trends, such as the EU’s Corporate Reporting Directive, Due Diligence Directive, China’s nature risk disclosure initiatives with two major stock exchanges declaring self-regulatory guidance, Australia’s voluntary nature repair market and the promotion of clean energy in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, were underscored as key drivers of this shift, along with increasing recognition of the financial imperatives to better understand and manage business risks arising from environmental degradation, irrespective of the political context. 

In this context, The Biodiversity Consultancy team facilitated two workshops at the conference, one on the Practical Steps to Get Started with TNFD LEAP for Financial Institutions and another on Integrating biodiversity impacts into decision-making with the Biodiversity Impact Assessment Framework (BIAF).  

On 10th December, the team led a session on the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), offering pragmatic guidance for investors to assess and address nature-related risks by applying the LEAP approach: Locate, Evaluate, Assess and Prepare. This session drew from our experience delivering practical TNFD workshops for numerous banks and investors and equipping them with pragmatic and actionable strategies to combine analysis for reporting, with action to mitigate risk.  

That afternoon, Sam Lacey ran a workshop with WWF to support nature finance investors to apply a systematic methodology to identify and quantify the biodiversity impacts of a diverse range of nature finance investments, including those that restore or conserve biodiversity directly and those that benefit biodiversity by reducing the drivers of biodiversity loss. The Biodiversity Impact Assessment Framework (BIAF), developed for WWF by The Biodiversity Consultancy and launched in June 2024, is a tool that quantifies the benefits of nature-positive investments using a consistent approach that is comparable between diverse investments and empowers investors to systematically articulate the benefits of their investments and to identify actions to further enhance the impacts.  

Building Bridges started in 2019 in Geneva to promote engagement and collaboration year-round through its flagship annual event. It is committed to leveraging finance to support a global economic model aligned with social and environmental sustainability, as outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement while encouraging capital allocation towards prosperity and preserving our planet’s balance. 

If you would like to know more information, please contact our team here.

Categories: Financial Services, Company news