Nature Positive Investors
Identifying and quantifying benefits to nature
The transition of the global economy towards nature positive presents investment opportunities as companies seek ways to reduce their impacts on nature, and compensate for residual impacts. This includes new technologies to replace more polluting ones, new materials with a smaller biodiversity footprint as well as natural capital investments in regenerative agriculture or nature based credits. Investors and lenders can catalyse this shift by making allocating capital for nature finance and structuring specific instruments including incentives or blended finance.
Impact investors, issuers of green bonds, insurance companies and natural capital asset managers are accountabile to their investors to ensure their products align with their sustainability or impact goals. Lenders who issue labelled products may also need to comply with international standards such as the climate bonds initiative, the EU taxonomy or ICMA’s green and social bond principles.
Biodiversity impact measurement
It can be challenging to quantify the biodiversity impact of an investment in a robust, verifiable and comparable way that is easily understood by stakeholders. Our technical consultants are world leaders in developing metrics to quantify outcomes for nature. Our work includes advising the Nature Positive Initiative on their State of Nature Metrics, and authoring the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) state of nature metrics. We have also developed a framework in collaboration with WWF that enables investors to quantify potential biodiversity impact across a broad variety of investment types in a comparable way (called BIAF), so that different types of biodiversity impact can be understood and compared. Application of the framework helps to verify the impact of nature outcomes and therefore minimise the risk of inaccurate statements that may lead to accusations of greenwashing .
We enable investors to aggregate, evaluate and communicate the impact of their investments to ensure compliance with standards, investment mandates and principles. Our teams develop bespoke approaches to meet a variety of investors needs across all geographies. We developed the World Bank’s Nature Finance Tracking methodology and bespoke approaches to quantifying the potential impact prior to investment (ex-ante) and monitoring and verifying the achieved impact during the life of the investment (ex-post) for various natural capital investors and development banks.
Our approaches can help investors to anticipate and quantify the biodiversity impacts of sustainability linked loans and green bonds, report impacts of natural capital funds and prepare investees to monetise biodiversity benefits through biodiversity credits and nature based carbon credits.
Investment Due Diligence
We offer site level due diligence to evaluate and identify both positive and negative nature related impacts. This helps natural capital investors to avoid reputational risk from unsubstantiated claims about positive impacts, or worse, from unintended negative impacts, for example from in appropriate tree planting causing biodiversity loss. To help manage risk and enhance positive impact we can also advise on action plans and monitoring plans to manage biodiversity impact throughout the lifecycle of an investment. Adoption of key biodiversity metrics enables our clients to actively manage and clearly articulate the impact of their nature positive investments.
