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Measuring nature with the Robeco Biodiversity Traffic Light
Investors realize that nature loss represents systemic risks for investment portfolios but find it difficult to measure and mitigate. That is the main message from our conversations with asset owners in the past year, including a roundtable held with five investors and the World Wide Fund for Nature – Netherlands.
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Summary
- Clients confirm materiality of biodiversity, but ask how and why to act now
- Their main challenge is measuring nature risks and impacts in portfolios
- Robeco’s Biodiversity Traffic Light assesses corporate positioning on nature
To make nature more tangible for portfolios, Robeco is proud to launch the Biodiversity Traffic Light, which identifies leaders and laggards across the investment universe, and enables investors to incorporate these insights into strategies and active ownership.
The traffic light allows investors to tilt portfolios toward companies that could be better prepared for the biodiversity transition and away from those that are lagging behind. Our new white paper, ‘Measuring nature in investments: Unlocking opportunities to invest in the transition’, explains how it all works.
The white paper include the comments of investors in the roundtable, which have helped shape the response to an issue that has vexed investors for many years. Investors mention two challenges in particular:
How to measure and monitor nature risks and impacts in portfolios?
How to invest in core portfolios in public markets that goes beyond asset classes such as farming and forestry?
While these challenges remain, at the same time significant progress has been made in the past year in making nature more tangible. Last July, the Taskforce for Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) released detailed sector guides defining the key impacts and metrics per industry group. This helped to create agreement on which of the many aspects of nature loss investors should focus on within each industry.
On the back of this, data providers released improved datasets, often developed in collaboration with nature organizations. Based on these developments, Robeco was able to develop the Biodiversity Traffic Light and use it for our own investments, led by the Biodiversity Equities strategy.
In this paper, we present our approach to biodiversity and the tools that we offer to clients for the integration of biodiversity in investments. The paper starts with an overview of the state of nature loss and the global policy response. In the second chapter, we discuss the role of investors based on the comments from the participants in the roundtable.
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