Rathbone Greenbank Investments has signed the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge, which was launched by 26 financial institutions from ten countries in September.

Greenbank is already involved in a working group as part of the Finance for Biodiversity initiative, to develop guidance for financial institutions on how to measure their impact. This pledge will enable collaboration and action to agree on effective measures to reverse nature loss. The pledge will call on global leaders to agree on effective measures to reverse nature loss this decade at the Convention on Biological Diversity, which takes place in China in May 20212.

Signatories to the pledge commit to the following actions by 2024: collaborate and share knowledge with other institutions, engage with portfolio companies, assess the impact of their investments on biodiversity, set science-based targets and report publicly on progress.

Greenbank points out that there are several drivers of biodiversity loss and these are having a knock-on impact on the vital ecosystem services that biodiversity provides, creating multiple risks for businesses and investors. Healthy societies, resilient economies and thriving businesses all rely on nature, yet the following facts expose the state of nature around the globe, and a situation which urgently needs to change:

Almost 70% of global biodiversity has been lost since 1970;

There is an extinction threat to a million species, with risks to wider ecosystem services that support societies and economies;

In the US, $44 trillion of economic value is exposed as a result of the loss of nature;

Halting biodiversity decline can be a critical enabler of positive change for several other sustainable development goals.

According to Greenbank currently there is an absence of agreed biodiversity measurement methodologies, a dearth of corporate data and a lack of any internationally agreed goals in a similar manner to the Paris Agreement for climate change.