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A group of investors and organizations, coordinated by World Bank, announced on Wednesday their intention to establish the Nature 100+ initiative, serving as the biodiversity equivalent of the Climate Action 100+ investor initiative.
Eleven researchers at Colombia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), as well as the World Benchmarking Alliance and the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge, have been actively working with World Bank to create a model for the Nature 100+ initiative, which aims to mitigate biodiversity loss through investor engagement.
The initiative will use a similar framework to Climate Action 100+, the world’s largest investor initiative, representing over $54 trillion in assets under management, which calls on corporate greenhouse gas emitters to decarbonize in line with Paris Agreement goals.
In a recent report, World Bank outlines that the Nature 100+ initiative will feature four “priority areas of work:” engagement, awareness and education, reporting and measurement, and policy/regulatory advocacy.
A “critical aspect” of the initiative’s success will be “converging around a single, universal metric for measuring biodiversity loss,” which can be used to help issuers establish near- to medium-term net-zero biodiversity loss targets.
SIPA researchers have also proposed a draft methodology for identifying and shortlisting companies to engage with, based on their impacts or dependencies on nature.
In the initiative’s initial stages, Nature 100+ may permit any interested investors to join to “maximize scale and momentum benefits.” Later, the initiative is likely to employ a “tiered model, where investors self-select into groups depending on how much action they are willing to take on biodiversity.”
Rebecca Sherratt 