Investor mood turns sour on biodiversity: ‘it is a scary zone’
Panellists at a conference in Paris expressed their concern about the biodiversity investment space as a host of challenges throw doubt on how fast they can move
Recent climatological developments have proved a setback to the climate change movement, according to an industry heavyweight speaking at a conference in Paris yesterday.
Robin Millington, chief executive of environmental think tank Planet Tracker, said: “What gets me out of bed six months ago, I would have been enthusiastically saying I’m getting up to change the world."
She was responding to a question of what factors in biodiversity get her out of bed in the morning.
“I've hit a wall in the last three months. I get out of bed now fearful and very angry. We have six continents in food stress right now and the Antarctic is melting. But those six continents are in danger not just because of the Ukraine and Russia, but because of climate change.”
While late last year there were positive developments, such as binding commitments made at the COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal, as a reason for the downturn in sentiment Millington referred to data published six days ago by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
The WMO now predicts that the El Nino wave of warm currents from the Pacific Ocean is 70% likely to happen in the next twelve months, at a time when the ocean itself is recording warmer than usual temperatures.
This could lead to the world reaching the 1.5 degrees warming threshold described the Paris Agreement in 2024, over two decades before the worldwide net zero target.
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Millington made the remarks during a panel discussion on ‘biodiversity and the bottom line: why investors should care’ at Climate Action’s yearly European sustainable investment forum, hosted in Paris for the first time since 2019.
She also expressed anger at the perceived slow nature of the transition and pressed executives to do more to facilitate net zero, referencing the decades old 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Matt Christensen, global head of sustainable and impact investing at Allianz Global Investors, also noted the importance of consistent data altering any changes in investment, particularly related to biodiversity.
“Investment teams are really interested in biodiversity, but the incentive structures make it a challenge of how fast they might feel comfortable to move towards this area when the data is not perfect.
“If you don’t have decent data to start playing around with it's a scary zone," he added.
If you don’t have decent data to start playing around with, biodiversity is a scary zone.
Millington made the remarks during a panel discussion on ‘biodiversity and the bottom line: why investors should care’ at Climate Action’s yearly European sustainable investment forum, hosted in Paris for the first time since 2019.
She also expressed anger at the perceived slow nature of the transition and pressed executives to do more to facilitate net zero, referencing the decades old 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Matt Christensen, global head of sustainable and impact investing at Allianz Global Investors, also noted the importance of consistent data altering any changes in investment, particularly related to biodiversity.
“Investment teams are really interested in biodiversity, but the incentive structures make it a challenge of how fast they might feel comfortable to move towards this area when the data is not perfect.
“If you don’t have decent data to start playing around with it's a scary zone.”, he said.
Natural Capital
During the panel, Nathalie Lhayani, president at French SIF, called for a fundamental reassessment of finance that better incorporated biodiversity concerns.
“We need to see nature as infrastructure or as capital, and destroying capital needs to be replaced in any economy or business model. To see nature as capital gives it value and could totally change the way we build our business models," she said.
We have six continents in food stress right now and the Antarctic is melting.
At an earlier discussion, acting as an update on progress in biodiversity since the COP15 conference, Romie Goedicke, associate nature lead at the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, relayed statistics including that the biomass of pigs alone is nearly double that of all wild land mammals, according to a study by the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Millington also pushed back against the perception, increasingly promoted by the anti-ESG movement in the US, that a focus on sustainability is a betrayal of fiduciary duty.
“There is data here. It may not be perfect, it may not be standardised, yet if you take the data that's available and do the analysis on it, what you find is over and over again, that sustainability brings a higher profit," she told delegates.
"That ultimately is going to help change people's activity and their incentives”, she said, also referring to a soon to be published Planet Tracker case study which shows greater returns for sustainable fisheries versus unsustainable," Millington concluded.
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