Pictet Asset Management is a founding partner for a research programme that helps the financial industry develop strategies to protect natural capital and biodiversity.
The initiative, which will receive approximately EUR5 million in research funding from Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, will be overseen by the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) at Stockholm University.
Pictet AM is so far the only asset management company in the Biodiversity Finance (BIOFIN) programme and its role is to provide investment expertise and to contribute to 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.
Leading the BIOFIN research programme will be SRC Professor Gary Peterson, who was a coordinating lead author for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s Scenario Assessment and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services scenarios and model assessment. He will be joined by Professor Beatrice Crona, Deputy Science Director of the SRC.
Sebastien Eisinger, Managing Partner 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.”
“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,” Peterson said.
This unique collaboration extends Pictet AM’s nine-year relationship with the SRC, whose Planetary Boundary Framework provides the analytical underpinning for the Pictet-Global Environmental Opportunities investment strategy, one of the largest of its kind in the world.