Biodiversity | ~ 4 min read
Nurturing nature: our commitment
According to the World Economic Forum, more than half of the world’s GDP depends on nature and its ecosystem services and is therefore exposed to nature loss. Investors have an opportunity to lead the transition towards a nature-positive system to halt the loss of biodiversity and preserve ecosystem services. What role are we playing?
This year, Allianz Global Investors has taken several significant steps to reinforce our commitment to protecting biodiversity. We became a member of the Task Force for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), joined the Nature Action 100 initiative and formalised our approach to biodiversity in a new policy statement.
The establishment of the TNFD was an important milestone to develop an international reporting structure that provides a complete picture of companies’ nature-related risks – similar to the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures for climate change. We are convinced that the TNFD will become an integral framework for biodiversity and more broadly for our “planetary boundaries” theme – a concept that covers all aspects of living sustainably and equitably in a future higher temperature world.
We collaborate with other TNFD members to support systemic progress on planetary boundaries and biodiversity concerns – for example, by shaping new developments around nature-related financial disclosures and impact measurement.
Making a statement
Our new Biodiversity Policy Statement outlines both our views on biodiversity as an active investor and our approach to enhancing biodiversity integration across investments and portfolios. It features our commitments to the following areas:
- Active research: with our thematic focus on the planetary boundaries topic, we identify, monitor and analyse the most relevant industry sectors with both a higher dependency and impact on biodiversity.
- Strong stewardship approach: we deploy active engagement to tackle issues like deforestation, water, plastic and chemical pollution, and regenerative agriculture.
- Industry collaboration: as a TNFD member, we aggregate information on nature-related reporting.
- Exclusion policies: we apply exclusions to our designated sustainable strategies to address sectors with the highest biodiversity risk.
- Integrating data: we reflect the material aspects of biodiversity in our investment decisions by integrating biodiversity-related data into our investment processes; we also analyse the impacts of companies’ operations on key biodiversity indicators using biodiversity-related datapoints from our ESG data platform.
Adding new key performance indicators to our ESG data platform is the next stage. This will include metrics such as the Mean Species Abundance metric.1 Giving our investment teams access to data and specialised tools means enhanced sustainability-informed investment decisions and the potential to achieve non-financial outcomes alongside financial returns.
To learn more about why biodiversity matters for investors, view our new guide.
1 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services – definition of Mean species abundance
