A four-year global research programme, geared to helping the financial industry develop strategies to protect natural capital and halt biodiversity loss, has been launched.
Pictet Asset Management has been selected as a founding partner and is the only asset manager in the Biodiversity Finance (BIOFIN) programme.
€5 million in research funding has been allocated by Mistra, a Swedish environmental research foundation , and will be overseen by the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) at Stockholm University.
Pictet AM’s role will be to provide investment expertise and to contribute to transdisciplinary research that can help bring about nature-positive changes in the financial system.
It will work alongside consortium members including the UN Principles for Responsible Investment and Stanford University.
The BIOFIN programme has been devised to integrate the protection and restoration of natural capital into financial and investment decision making worldwide.
SRC professor Gary Peterson will head the BIOFIN research programme. He will be joined by Professor Beatrice Crona, deputy science director of the SRC.
Peterson said: “Creating a sustainable world requires transformative change and finance is a key part of that change. To the transformation of finance, we plan to work to ensure that the mainstream of finance better addresses the complexity of the living, while also exploring the margins of finance to identify alternative ways of connecting finance and the living world.”
Sebastien Eisinger, managing partner at Pictet Group, said: “Biodiversity is an important issue in sustainable investment, and we’re delighted to extend our relationship with the SRC and work with consortium partners to advance our collective knowledge on interactions between biodiversity and investments.”
Pictet AM has a nine-year relationship with the SRC, whose Planetary Boundary Framework provides the analytical underpinning for the Pictet-Global Environmental Opportunities investment strategy.
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