Here we gather scientific publications from the Mistra FinBio program and the researcher involved in the project.
HAPP: High-accuracy pipeline for processing deep metabarcoding data
John Sundh , Emma Granqvist , Ela Iwaszkiewicz-Eggebrecht, Lokeshwaran Manoharan, Laura J. A. van Dijk, Robert Goodsell, Nerivania N. Godeiro, Bruno C. Bellini, Johanna Orsholm, Piotr Łukasik, Andreia Miraldo, Tomas Roslin, Ayco J. M. Tack, Anders F. Andersson , Fredrik Ronquist “HAPP: High-accuracy pipeline for processing deep metabarcoding data” PLOS Computational Biology 21(11): e1013558.
Deep metabarcoding offers an efficient and reproducible approach to biodiversity monitoring, but noisy data and incomplete reference databases challenge accurate diversity estimation and taxonomic annotation. Here, we introduce a novel algorithm, NEEAT, for removing spurious operational taxonomic units (OTUs) originating from nuclear-embedded mitochondrial DNA sequences (NUMTs) or sequencing errors. It integrates ‘echo’ signals across samples with the identification of unusual evolutionary patterns among similar DNA sequences. We also extensively benchmark current tools for chimera removal, taxonomic annotation and OTU clustering of deep metabarcoding data. The best performing tools/parameter settings are integrated into HAPP, a high-accuracy pipeline for processing deep metabarcoding data. Read more
Green or brown: are article 8 & 9 fund portfolios different?
Mark Sanctuary, Axel Lavenius, Giorgio Parlato, Jan Plue, Beatrice Crona “Green or brown: are article 8 & 9 fund portfolios different?” The European Journal of Finance, 1–35.
This paper examines the extent to which the portfolios of green and conventional funds differ. We use non-metric multidimensional scaling to analyze the securities held by 6888 funds traded on European markets as of March 2023. This numerical methodology reduces the fund compositional matrix from thousands of dimensions to two dimensions, revealing patterns that can be studied graphically. We use the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation’s Articles 8 and 9 to classify green funds, and with few exceptions find that green fund portfolios are largely the same as conventional fund portfolios. A notable exception are energy sector funds, where there are distinct differences between the holdings of green and conventional funds. Read more
A systems approach to sustainable finance: Actors, influence mechanisms, and potentially virtuous cycles of sustainability
Beatrice Crona, Garry Peterson, Megan Meacham, Giorgio Parlato, Steve J. Lade, Juan C Rocha, Victor Galaz “A systems approach to sustainable finance: Actors, influence mechanisms, and potentially virtuous cycles of sustainability” iScience 2025 Jun 6; 28 (7): 112785.
Over the past decade, corporate investors have increasingly recognized that responsible environmental and social practices are essential to long-term financial success. Despite growing interest, corporate practices remain largely unchanged, and planetary trends are deeply concerning. This review applies a systems analysis lens to understand how financial sector structures and actors influence sustainability outcomes, often in counterproductive ways. Key barriers include the lack of science-based metrics, poor integration of environmental risks, and limited capacity to evaluate complex system dynamics. Read more
Unlocking private finance for nature: Addressing barriers and reframing risk-return dynamics
Hassan Aftab Sheikh, Divya Narain, Clint Bartlett, Christophe Christiaen “Unlocking private finance for nature: Addressing barriers and reframing risk-return dynamics” iScience 2025 Nov 21: 11113669
Public finance alone is insufficient to meet the scale of investment required for nature protection, restoration, and sustainable management. Mobilizing private capital is therefore essential, yet most nature-related projects are perceived as unbankable. They sit at the frontier of bankability: nascent and unproven initiatives that lack historical track records, face high execution risks, and generate uncertain or delayed revenues. This misalignment is compounded by investor behavior, as most financiers demand commercial rates of return, standardized transactions, and short payback periods. Even though investors differ in their appetite for risk, nature projects rarely meet these thresholds. Read more
Location, location, location: asset location data sources for nature-related financial risk analysis
Christophe Christiaen, Philippa Lockwood, Alex Jackman, Ben Caldecott “Location, location, location: asset location data sources for nature-related financial risk analysis” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 74 (June):101527.
Nature, the services it provides and the threats it is exposed to are inherently location-specific. Therefore, financial institutions will need to apply geospatial analysis to accurately assess nature-related financial risks. As a minimum, this requires knowing where a counterparty’s operations or supply chains are located. Asset location information is often cited by financial institutions as a major data gap for nature-related analysis. While granular supply chain data is notoriously hard to collect, location information about companies’ direct operational assets is available for various industries. Read more
Challenges and opportunities when assessing exposure of financial investments to ecosystem regime shifts
André Pinto da Silva, Nielja Knecht, Romain Thomas, Romi Lotcheris, Beatrice Crona, Juan Carlos Rocha “Challenges and opportunities when assessing exposure of financial investments to ecosystem regime shifts” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 74 (June):101526.
Financial investments will be affected by ecological regime shifts through the loss of natural resources underpinning the dependencies of most economic sectors. We suggest one possible pathway to link industry and products to the likelihood of ecological regime shifts. The challenges and opportunities are discussed at each step, including datasets, methods, and metrics. To this end, we identify recent large-scale, state-of-the-art literature that can link land-based company activities to regime shifts. The estimation of investment exposure to regime shifts is possible, but higher resolution in company trade data, as well as spatially explicit datasets of commodity production, is needed to improve estimations. This will require a coordinated effort from the scientific community, businesses, and the policy sector. Read more
Sustainable finance, biodiversity, and greenwashing: how contested values, metrics, and causation facilitate information distortion, information omission, and information pollution
Job de Grefte, Boudewijn de Bruin “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 (June):101522.
Biodiversity finance aims to support ecosystem and habitat preservation but faces significant challenges of greenwashing. This article critically examines the specific difficulties in addressing greenwashing within biodiversity finance. Through a critical interpretative review of recent theoretical and empirical studies, the article shows how the contested value of biodiversity, its diverse measurement methodologies, and the debated causal impacts of biodiversity finance create opportunities for greenwashing. These challenges are not general issues of sustainable finance but are tied to the specific aspects of biodiversity finance. Read more
The transformative potential of eDNA-based biodiversity impact assessment
Granqvist, Emma, Robert M Goodsell, Mats Töpel, and Fredrik Ronquist. 2025. “The Transformative Potential of eDNA-Based Biodiversity Impact Assessment.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 73 (April):101517.
Biodiversity impact assessments aim to enable market actors, regulators, and political agents to effectively steer human activities in a more sustainable direction. However, current biodiversity impact assessments often rely on biased, incomplete, or indirect data. We review the potential of addressing these shortcomings using emerging methods based on environmental DNA (eDNA). Read more
The ethical foundations of biodiversity metrics
Eliza C Nobles “The ethical foundations of biodiversity metrics” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 72 (February):101503.
Contemporarily, biodiversity loss is the prominent concern of the conservation movement. In reaction to the escalating depletion of biodiversity, governments and organizations are crafting policies and strategies with a central focus on biodiversity conservation. Assessing the extent of biodiversity loss and its relationship with human society necessitates reliable ecological metrics. However, the tools used to assess biodiversity encompass not only empirical dimensions but also normative values that shape conservation outcomes. Read more
Investment treaties and the replacement of stranded investment
Horn, Henrik, and Mark Sanctuary. 2025. “Investment Treaties and the Replacement of Stranded Investment.” International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, April.
A common claim holds that investment treaties reduce the willingness of host countries to regulate foreign-owned, environmentally-stranded, investments. A counter-argument is that the treaties can yield incentives for environmentally-friendly replacement investment. This paper examines these claims in a simple formal setting with an initial investment and a potential replacement investment, both of which are protected by an investment agreement. Read more
Essential environmental impact variables: A means for transparent corporate sustainability reporting aligned with planetary boundaries
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).
Despite numerous pledges to the contrary, corporate activities are inflicting environmental harm and are pushing the Earth system toward and beyond planetary boundaries. Several sustainability accounting frameworks exist, designed to track corporate environmental impacts through corporate reporting, and there is currently a push toward standardization of these. However, most sustainability accounting frameworks still fail to fully capture the connections between corporate activities and impacts, as they depart from what is important for the companies (materiality assessments) and often rely on relative metrics. Here, we propose 15 essential environmental impact variables (EEIVs), applicable to all sectors, based on absolute metrics and what is essential for staying within the planetary boundaries. Read more
Biosphere Futures: a database of social-ecological scenarios
Kuiper, Jan J., Liam R. Carpenter-Urquhart, Marta Berbés-Blázquez, Elisa Oteros-Rozas, Linna Fredström, Kinga Psiuk, Codruța Savu, et al. 2024. “Biosphere Futures: A Database of Social-Ecological Scenarios.” Ecology and Society 29 (1).
Biosphere Futures is a new online database to collect and discover scenario studies from across the world, with a specific focus on scenarios that explicitly incorporate interdependencies between humans and their supporting ecosystems. It provides access to a globally diverse collection of case studies that includes most ecosystems and regions, enabling exploration of the multifaceted ways in which the future might unfold. Together, the case studies illuminate the diversity and plurality of people’s expectations and aspirations for the future. Read more
Integrated modeling of nature’s role in human well-being: A research agenda
Chaplin-Kramer, Rebecca, Stephen Polasky, Rob Alkemade, Neil D. Burgess, William W. L. Cheung, Ingo Fetzer, Mike Harfoot, et al. 2024. “Integrated Modeling of Nature’s Role in Human Well-Being: A Research Agenda.” Global Environmental Change 88 (September):102891.
Integrated assessment models that incorporate biodiversity and ecosystem services could be an important tool for improving our understanding of interconnected social-economic-ecological systems, and for analyzing how policy alternatives can shift future trajectories towards more sustainable development. Despite recent scientific and technological advances, key gaps remain in the scientific community’s ability to deliver information to decision-makers at the pace and scale needed to address sustainability challenges. Read more
Breaking the ESG rating divergence: An open geospatial framework for environmental scores
Rossi, C., J. G. D. Byrne, C. Christiaen. 2024. Breaking the ESG rating divergence: An open geospatial framework for environmental scores, Journal of Environmental Management, Volume 349. Available online 7 November 2023.
Information about a company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance has become increasingly important in the decision-making process of financial institutions. The financial implications of environmental challenges (e.g. water stress), negative social impacts (e.g. health impacts in local communities) or poor corporate governance (e.g. breaching legislation) all continue to increase. Accordingly, there is a need for financial institutions to incorporate information on ESG risks, opportunities and impacts in decisions that relate to risk management, investments, credit, strategy, and reporting. Read more
Sustainable Finance as a Moral Obligation
Sandberg, J. 2023. Sustainable Finance as a Moral Obligation, The Reasoner 17 (3): 22-23.
Sustainable finance is basically about activities undertaken by financial agents, such as banks or investment funds, to support the transition of society towards greater social and environmental sustainability. This has recently become a major topic of interest among private market participants and public policy makers. One could say that there is a growing consensus around the idea that finance and investment have an important role to play in the sustainability transition. Read more
Financial influence on global risks of zoonotic emerging and re-emerging diseases: an integrative analysis
Galaz, V., Rocha, J., Sánchez-García, P., Dauriach, A., Roukny, T. & Søgaard Jørgensen, P. 2023. Financial influence on global risks of zoonotic emerging and re-emerging diseases: an integrative analysis. Lancet Planetary Health.
Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), such as Ebola virus disease and highly pathogenic influenza, are serious threats to human health and wellbeing worldwide. The financial sector has an important, yet often ignored, influence as owners and investors in industries that are associated with anthropogenic land-use changes in ecosystems linked to increased EIDs risks. We aimed to analyse financial influence associated with EIDs risks that are affected by anthropogenic land-use changes. We also aimed to provide empirical assessments of such influence to help guide engagements by governments, private organisations, and non-governmental organisations with the financial sector to advance a planetary health agenda. Read more
The forward-looking polluter pays principle for a just climate transition
Corvino, F. 2023. The Forward-Looking Polluter Pays Principle for a Just Climate Transition. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, online first, pp. 1-28.
Climate justice demands polluters to take responsibility for both present and future harm caused by past GHG emissions and for future harm caused by future GHG emissions. One problem with this is double climate taxation: people living in historical polluting countries must both shoulder the burden of an effective and inclusive climate transition and repay the climate debt incurred by their predecessors. Read more
Climate Change and the Circumstances of Justice
Corvino, F. 2023. Climate Change and the Circumstances of Justice, In Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, edited by Gianfranco Pellegrino and Marcello Di Paola. New York: Springer, pp. 1-17.
This chapter questions whether the objective circumstances of justice, and in particular the assumption of mutual advantage, apply to climate action. The first part of the chapter explains why two asymmetries, of benefits and costs, further exacerbated by intergenerational conflicts, both past and future oriented, make climate change an intricate multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma. The second part of the chapter analyses whether and how the two asymmetries can be scaled down, based on a series of empirical arguments: global vulnerability to local economic setbacks, financial risks and security threats (benefit asymmetry), co-benefits of the energy transition immediately collectable, especially in developed and some emerging countries (cost asymmetry), moral, axiological and economic benefits of intergenerational sustainability (intergenerational conflicts). The conclusion is that the circumstances of justice, that make climate cooperation both possible and necessary, obtain, in spite of the two global asymmetries and of intergenerational conflicts. Read more
Global Climate Justice: Theory and Practice
Corvino, F., & Andina, T. eds. 2023. Global Climate Justice: Theory and Practice. Bristol, UK: E-International Relations.
This book offers philosophical and interdisciplinary insights into global climate justice with a view to climate neutrality by the middle of the twenty-first century. The first section brings together a series of introductory contributions on the state of the climate crisis, covering scientific, historical, diplomatic and philosophical dimensions. The second section focuses on the challenges of justice and responsibility to which the climate crisis exposes and will expose the global community in the coming years: on the one hand, aiming for the ambitious mitigation target of 1.5°C and, on the other hand, securing resources for adaptation and for climate-damage compensation to the most vulnerable. The third section investigates normative aspects of the transition towards a fossil-fuel free society, from the responsibility of oil companies to the gender-differentiated effects of climate change, passing through what is owed to transition losers and the legal protection of future generations. Read more
Going beyond carbon: An “Earth system impact” score to better capture corporate and investment impacts on the earth system
Crona, B., Parlato, G., Lade, S., Fetzer, I., & Maus, V. 2023. Going beyond carbon: An” Earth system impact” score to better capture corporate and investment impacts on the earth system. Journal of Cleaner Production, 429, 139523.
Corporations are responsible for a significant portion of observed impacts on the Earth system, including green-house gas (GHG) emissions, but also water extraction, landuse change and other pressures on nature. These nature-related impacts are essential to consider and capture because they have local impacts on a range of ecosystem functions on which companies and economies depend, but they also fundamentally affect our ability to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate. Furthermore, climate, land and water interact and affect each other in various ways, such that climate change can be exacerbated by degraded ecosystems, which in turn are dependent on water. Read more
Sweet Spots or Dark Corners? An environmental sustainability examination of Big Data and AI in ESG
Crona, B., & Sundström, E. 2023. Sweet Spots or Dark Corners? An Environmental Sustainability View of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in ESG. In Handbook of Big Data and Analytics in Accounting and Auditing (pp. 105-131). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
This chapter examines environmental aspects of ESG and risks and opportunities for using big data and AI to capture these in ESG ratings. It starts by outlining the difference between relative and absolute sustainability and what this means for delivering on globally agreed upon targets, such as the Sustainable Development Goals. We then look at what the state-of-the-art climate and Earth System science has to offer investors interested in absolute environmental sustainability. Next we discuss the risks associated with a blurring of concepts relating to sustainability and materiality, and examine and contrast conventional ESG rating procedures with new approaches informed by big data (BD) and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand what this new generation of tools can offer investors interested in sustainability. We note a current misalignment between stated ambitions of investors, and the ability to deliver on stated goals through the use of current ESG metrics and ratings. We therefore finish with suggestions for how to better align these and how those interested in ESG can become more ‘sustainability savvy’ consumers of such ratings. Read more
Climate Change, the Non-identity Problem, and the Metaphysics of Transgenerational Actions
Andina, T., & Corvino, F. 2023. Climate Change, the Non-Identity Problem, and the Metaphysics of Transgenerational Actions, In Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, edited by Gianfranco Pellegrino and Marcello Di Paola. New York: Springer, pp. 1-22.
Why should one take action to move toward a greener world if doing so will cause the birth of a totally different group of future people? This chapter starts from the metaphysical evidence that many collective climate actions imply a change in the identity of future generations, as opposed to a counterfactual laissez-faire attitude. The climatic fallout from the non-identity paradox introduced by Derek Parfit is examined to determine if and how a principle of transgenerational responsibility can be defended against this metaphysical complexity. The paradox is divided into a moral argument, based on the person-affecting view of harm, and a metaphysical premise, treating non-identity as a result of variations in timing and pair combination of a person’s conception. Three strategies to circumvent the moral argument are explored: non-consequentialist accounts of harm, moral thresholds, and impersonal ethics. However, it is argued that all three strategies fall short or come with too high a cost. The metaphysical premise is then examined through the introduction of transgenerational actions in relation to the climate crisis. A principle of transgenerational responsibility applicable to climate change mitigation is inferred from the hypothetical consent to be obtained from those who will continue transgenerational actions in the future. Read more
Transgenerational Social Structures and Fictional Actors: Community-Based Responsibility for Future Generations
Andina, T, & Corvino, F. 2023. Transgenerational Social Structures and Fictional Actors: Community-Based Responsibility for Future Generations. The Monist 106 (2): 150–164.
The notion of transgenerational community is usually based on two diachronic interactions. The first interaction consists of present generations taking up the legacy (not only economic, but also institutional, artistic, cultural, and so forth) of past generations and giving it continuity, exercising a form of active agency. The second interaction occurs when present generations pass on their legacy to future generations. This is supposed to expand the boundaries of the community in a transgenerational sense (both backward- and forward-looking). In this article we argue that the transgenerational community can be grounded on a different ontological insight: future generations play the role of fictional actors for present generations, i.e., present generations entertain a present-time interaction with future generations, insofar as future generations are functional for the realization of transgenerational actions. This lays the foundations for more solid community-based bonds of intergenerational justice. Read more
