FinBio Key Messages
Mistra FinBio’s key messages distill the main insights from across the research programme. They are based on the research done in all workpackages and were curated during a workshop involving all programme researchers. The key messages reflect the programme’s diverse perspectives and a shared, transdisciplinary understanding of what is most important for advancing nature-positive finance.
Economies and investments both depend on and impact nature. The impacts put on the
environments are cumulative and can spread across sectors and regions.
Corporate activities all directly or indirectly rely on nature, due to its provision of materials, its maintenance of a safe operating environment, and reliable functioning of labour, supply chains, and markets. However, corporate activities are the prime driver of biodiversity loss and are destabilizing nature in multiple ways. Understanding a company’s dependencies and impacts on nature is fundamental to assessing the risks to any investment as increased instability in environmental systems from local to global scales is threatening to increase shocks and system risks. Better understanding of pressures and dependencies also leads to a greater understanding of a system and what makes it resilient and thereby more likely to continue to be dependable in and after a shock event. (1)
Environmental reporting must be grounded in science and aligned with national and international environmental policy targets and regulatory frameworks.
Standardizing corporate reporting of environmental impacts and dependencies will increase transparency and comparability and thereby reduce greenwashing. As reporting standards for nature and biodiversity are developing, there is a need and an opportunity to let science inform environmental disclosures and materiality analyses to ensure that these disclosures are relevant for assessing actual environmental impacts and dependencies. Using science to guide disclosures also promises to reduce the volume of disclosures and thus helping to reduce the burden of reporting. Anchoring the reporting system in science is crucial to make sure companies report on what matters and to ensure investments actually contribute to delivering on biodiversity pledges. A science-based reporting system also promises to build literacy in the financial system and strengthen investor knowledge and competence on nature-related issues. (2,3,4)
Credible environmental impact reporting and risks assessment rely on transparent, relevant and decision-useful information, and access to such data through open databases and freely accessible science-based models and tools.
Data availability is key to assess an actor’s pressure on the planet and to track progress towards biodiversity targets over time. Current practices for assessing environmental performance suffer from multiple problems that prevent them from delivering on ambitions to reduce environmental harm and promote biodiversity and nature positive economies. These problems stem from inconsistencies in what raw data is collected or generated and how, but also a general lack of awareness in the financial sector about the limitations associated with different data generation methods and analytical models and the consequences of this for the conclusions that can be drawn regarding the environmental (biodiversity) performance of a given entity. Furthermore, most models currently used for assessing the risks associated with observed impacts on nature and biodiversity do not handle shocks or non-linear environmental change, knowledge and competence on nature-related issues.(5,6,7,8,9)
Nature-positive finance is constrained by current national and international agreements, policies, regulations and current practices.
The effect of a given impact on biodiversity impacts is location specific and therefore context dependent. This presents a challenge for corporate governance connected to biodiversity as what works in one context may be unfeasible or counterproductive in another. Best practices for corporations and investors will therefore always need to be re-interpreted through a local context and locally adapted. Another challenge hampering biodiversity enhancing business and investment practices is that existing investment treaties and trade agreements often create a form of regulatory freeze, where governments hesitate to adopt stronger environmental protections for fear of legal or financial repercussions tied to the treaties and agreements. (10,11,12,13,14)
Building a nature-positive economy relies on avoiding greenwashing while establishing new norms, ethical standards, and accountability mechanisms.
Understanding and measuring pressure put on biodiversity is more complex than understanding and measuring climate effects (measuring emissions). The contested value of biodiversity, its diverse measurement methodologies, and the debated causal impacts of biodiversity finance create opportunities for greenwashing through multiple mechanisms: information distortion, information omission, and information pollution. Tailor-made policy and regulatory frameworks effectively mitigate greenwashing risks and are therefore necessary. (15,16,17)
Scaling nature-positive finance requires removing structural and behavioral barriers while creating virtuous cycles of sustainability across multiple asset classes.
Transforming financial systems toward sustainability depends on aligning financial mechanisms for influence and incentives with ecological realities. The financial sector has three primary levers or ways of influencing sustainability outcomes; filtering, funding, and exerting authority and these can be deployed differently depending on the asset class in focus. Virtuous cycles of sustainability can be established when the sustainable investment strategies and influence mechanisms of various financial actors—such as public equity investors, lenders of capital, and venture capital providers—are mutually supportive and reinforcing, amplifying their collective effectiveness to accelerate a systemic shift toward greener economies. Identifying leverage points with systemic impacts is crucial and even small shifts in rules or incentives can have huge effects. (18)
Nature holds multiple types of value – intrinsic, instrumental, and relational. To reduce risks and to benefit from opportunities, financial actors must understand and navigate these diverse value dimensions.
IPBES Nature Futures Framework divides human values and relationships with nature into three perspectives—Nature for Nature, Nature for Society, and Nature as Culture. Conventional finance frameworks recognize primarily the benefits nature provides to people and markets (Nature for Society). The intrinsic value (Nature for Nature) and relational values (Nature as Culture) that connect societies, cultures, and ecosystems are most often overlooked. However, recognizing and integrating plural values into financial analysis can reveal hidden dependencies, strengthen accountability, and prevent narrow or one-dimensional metrics from driving greenwashing. By embedding ecological, ethical, and cultural perspectives into financial tools and governance systems, institutions can better capture the true systemic importance of nature. (19,20,10)
Transitioning to nature-positive finance demands that financial institutions strengthen their skills, knowledge, and capacity to identify, manage, and invest in nature-related opportunities and risks.
Investors need to begin to actively avoid nature-related systemic risks. To do so means developing the capacity to understand the value of, and stewarding, nature as a core asset. Investments in significantly increased biodiversity literacy that connects ecological understanding with financial decision-making is a prerequisite for this capacity building. Financial actors must invest in knowledge, tools, and training that enable them to recognize both the risks of nature loss and the opportunities of restoration. Science has a key role to play as an intermediary - alongside proxy providers and consultancies - in translating complex biodiversity data into actionable strategies for investors and regulators. (21,9)
Abrupt change and surprise are often a key part of change in nature, society, and the economy.
The past five years has demonstrated that geo-politics, technology, and nature can all produce surprises that challenge conventional financial risk assessment. For financial actors, this means that relying on historical trends is risky. Investment strategies need to account for the possibility of sudden disruptions and ecological regime shifts, such as coral reef collapse, forest dieback, or eutrophication22. Financial actors need to prepare for these changes by building resilience to shocks, adaptive capacity to respond to change, and transformative capacity to redesign financial practices23.
While investors increasingly view adaptation and resilience as growth areas24, there is a need to assess whether these investments genuinely reduce long-term risk or instead lock in new vulnerabilities. Regulators and central banks face similar concerns, as financial flows can either amplify systemic risk or help stabilize social-ecological systems. Our research shows, for example, that in some coastal regions, development-driven land subsidence has increased flood risk more than climate change itself—illustrating how interacting pressures can push ecosystems and economies past critical thresholds. (25,26)
References:
1. Funke, H., Crona B., Christiaen, C. (in review) Making value-chain risk visible: Extending ENCORE for systemic insights. Business Strategy and the Environment
2. de Grefte, J., de Bruin, B. 2025. Sustainable finance, biodiversity, and greenwashing: how contested values, metrics, and causation facilitate information distortion, information omission, and information pollution. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 74
3. Kashyap, S., Abela, C. M., Blum, V., Crona, B. 2025. Business and finance on a path towards meaningful biodiversity reporting?. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 77, 101588.
4. Wassénius, E., Crona, B. and Quahe, S. 2024. Essential environmental impact variables: A means for transparent corporate sustainability reporting aligned with planetary boundaries. One Earth, 7(2), pp.211-225.
5. Kashyap, S., Abela, C. M., Blum, V., Crona, B. 2025. Business and finance on a path towards meaningful biodiversity reporting?. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 77, 101588.
6. Pinto da Silva A, Knecht N, Thomas R, Lotcheris R, Crona B, Rocha J. 2025. Challenges and opportunities when assessing exposure of financial investments to ecosystem regime shifts. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 74.
7. Crona, Polasky, Parlato, Blum,& Mathon (in review) A golden opportunity: Corporate sustainability reporting as a key lever to address nature-related risks. Ambio
8. Kashyap and Crona (in review) Not as different as we think: Bridging Accounting and Environmental Science for Biodiversity Reporting Quality In review for special issue in SSRN https://ssrn.com/abstract=6167711
9. Goodsell R.M., Granqvist E., Christiaen C., Ronquist F. (2025). Local data matters: Improving biodiversity risk and impact assessment through a data-quality focus. EcoEvoRxiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2XH2X
10. Christiaen, C.,, Lockwood, P., Jackman, A., Caldecott, B. 2025. Location, location, location: asset location data sources for nature-related financial risk analysis. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 74 :101527. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101527
11. Granqvist E., Goodsell R.M., Töpel M., Ronquist F. (2025). The transformative potential of eDNA-based biodiversity impact assessment. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 73, 101517. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2025.101517
12. Horn, H., Sanctuary, M. 2025. Investment treaties and the replacement of stranded investment. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 25: 425–448 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10784-025-09674-0
13. Sanctuary, M., Lavenius, A., Parlato, G., Plue, J., Crona, B. 2025. Green or brown: are article 8 & 9 fund portfolios different?. The European Journal of Finance, 31(15), 1948-1982.
14. Sandberg, J. & Rosenqvist, S. (under review). Understanding the Impact of Sustainable Finance: Attributional versus Counterfactual Accounts.
15. de Grefte, J., de Bruin, B. 2025. Sustainable finance, biodiversity, and greenwashing: how contested values, metrics, and causation facilitate information distortion, information omission, and information pollution. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 74
16. Kashyap and Crona (in review) Not as different as we think: Bridging Accounting and Environmental Science for Biodiversity Reporting Quality In review for special issue in SSRN https://ssrn.com/abstract=6167711
17. Gunnemyr, M. (2025) Shareholder Complicity. In Markovic, Lindgreen, Maon, Sancha, The Routledge Companion to Responsible Business. London: Routledge.
18. Crona, B., Peterson, G., Meacham, M., Parlato, G., Lade, S. J., Rocha, J. C., Galaz, V. 2025. A systems approach to sustainable finance: Actors, influence mechanisms, and potentially virtuous cycles of sustainability. iScience, 28:7:112785. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.112785
19. Nobles, E. C. 2025. The ethical foundations of biodiversity metrics. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2024.101503
20. Sandberg, J. 2023. Sustainable Finance as a Moral Obligation, The Reasoner 17 (3): 22-23
21. Crona, B., Peterson, G., Meacham, M., Parlato, G., Lade, S. J., Rocha, J. C., Galaz, V. 2025. A systems approach to sustainable finance: Actors, influence mechanisms, and potentially virtuous cycles of sustainability. iScience, 28:7:112785. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.112785
22. Rocha, J. C., Jouffray, J.-B., Bengtsson, F., Voicu, B.-I., Sánchez, P. A., & Galaz, V. 2025. Identifying companies and financial actors exposed to marine tipping points. arXiv. Preprint. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2411.10307
23. Wallington, Caroline and Peterson, Garry and Maciejewski, Kristi and Rocha, Juan C. and Biggs, Reinette, A global analysis of ecosystems and people at risk of ecological regime shifts. SSRN Preprint http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5417351
24. Peterson, Garry. 2025. “Why Companies and Their Investors Should Care About Corporate Resilience.” Mega. Pictet Asset Management. https://am.pictet.com/ch/en/institutions/mega/2025/resilience-investment-environment
25. Freedman, Stephen, and Katie Self. 2025. “Investing in Resilience: Adapting and Thriving in a Turbulent World.” Pictet Asset Management, October. https://am.pictet.com/ch/en/institutions/investment-views/active-equity/2025/investing-in-resilience
26. Wang, Y., Ye, Y., Nicholls, R.J., Olsson, L., van Vuuren, D.P., Peterson, G., He, Y., Li, M., Fan, J. and Scown, M., 2025. Development policy affects coastal flood exposure in China more than sea-level rise. Nature Climate Change, pp.1-7.