An institutional investor (£700+ billion AUM) with a commitment to becoming a nature-positive firm needed to assess the biodiversity impact and environmental materiality of their portfolio. Their goal was to inform strategic investment
decisions, including reallocation from high- to low-impact sectors and investees.
Conducting Biodiversity Footprinting
GIST Impact produced company-specific biodiversity footprints for portfolio investees using peer reviewed Life Cycle Impact Assessment methodologies. The biodiversity metric, Potentially Disappeared Fraction (PDF), indicates the impact on global species diversity from a company’s operations and value chain. As with other aspects of materiality assessment, biodiversity impacts can vary widely within a given sector, depending on the location and environmental pressures of a company’s operations. These granular insights empowered the firm to analyse the biodiversity implications for their portfolio and to productively engage with its investees.
Materiality Assessment Using Company-Reported Data
GIST Impact’s proprietary database of environmental drivers for 14,500+ companies was used to generate a detailed Materiality Heatmap that clearly identified which aspects of the firm’s portfolio have the largest impact on ecosystems, resource usage, climate, and pollution. The use of company-level data, rather than sector averages typically employed by other methods, provided the firm with confidence that the insights were highly relevant and actionable.
Opportunity Sveaskog is Sweden’s largest forestry company and owns over 14% of the nation’s forests. Sveaskog wanted to understand the net benefits to society provided through ecosystem services from Sveaskog’s…
Opportunity to conduct biodiversity footprinting As Melbourne’s largest water utility, Yarra Valley Water (YVW) recognised its responsibility towards sustainability and wanted to demonstrate its commitment and progress to restorative practices….
Challenge An institutional investor (£700+ billion AUM) with a commitment to becoming a nature-positive firm needed to assess the biodiversity impact and environmental materiality of their portfolio. Their goal was…
Our CEO Pavan Sukhdev joined the TMX Presents podcast to discuss what is at the heart of impact economics, growing investor interest in nature and biodiversity impacts, and why it’s…
It was a pleasure to be invited for Wall Street Horizon’s Data Minds webinar – Triple Threat: Leveraging Data to Manage AI, ESG, and ETF Risks – and to our…
We recently looked at the top pharmaceutical companies across developed markets to assess how successful they’ve been in reducing their natural capital impacts. Our analysis found that only 3 of…