FinBio’s mission is to provide cutting-edge research to connect the financial system and biodiversity with real-world impact. Here you will find the answers to key questions about our area of research.
Human activities, many of them commercial activities, today undermine the very base on which we ourselves depend – nature and a stable climate. These dependencies include pollination of crops by insects, regeneration of soils, pest controls in forestry or agriculture, storage of carbon and recycling of water, which leads to predictable rainfall. All of these are ecosystem services, underpinned by biodiversity, feeding into our economies, and the ability to make return on investments. When these functions are no longer provided, it will not only be costly, but sometime impossible for humans to thrive.
Beatrice Crona explains why investors should care about biodiversity in a webinar organised by Pictet:
Listen to the pocast version here:
The financial system is the backbone of our economic system. Through investments, loans, and ownership it steers what businesses thrive and what practices get scaled and end up dominating. Therefore it directly influences how much harm or good is done to nature and to biodiversity.
World leaders and governments have realized that we need to change the way we live on the planet. This is resulting in new regulations and policies that affect the financial system. Financial actors need to understand how they can be part of and help fund this change.
Greening finance is about taking stock of and reducing the environmental impacts of investments.
Financing green is about becoming nature-positive. This means developing ways of identifying business models that safeguard existing biodiversity, by integrating and enhancing biodiversity through their practice.
MISTRA FinBio will address the connectivity between biodiversity and finance in four distinct ways:
- We will explore and evaluate new technologies that track or map biodiversity and delivers open source data that we think could be transformative for the ability of biodiversity to actually be included in financial decision making.
- We will develop a set of examples of biodiversity markets and biodiversity funding mechanisms and trial these together with our stakeholders and our partners.
- We plan to develop a portfolio of scientifically grounded diagnostic tools that can be suitable for a range of different types of investors, such as asset managers, venture capital investors, or bond issuers.
- We hope to develop novel methods for stress testing national economic sectors in relation to biodiversity and also assess transition risks related to biodiversity and international trade agreements.
To address the gap between the financial system and sustainability science MISTRA FinBio has been developed as a transdisciplinary research programme. This means that researchers in the programme will work alongside and together with our industry partners to develop new science, and to translate the science into something that can be meaningfully used by investors in the short term.
MISTRA FinBio gathers a consortium of top scholars in a range of fields from economics to biodiversity science and even philosophy. To move rapidly from where we are now and find scientifically anchored investment practices, we will work together with carefully selected impact partners from industry, to drive change across a significant portion of the financial services industry.
