Duration: The project spans four years, from January 2024 to December 2027. The first results for two selected ecosystem services will be published by the end of 2024.
Outputs: The project partners will receive monetized estimates for sectoral and country-level biodiversity effects. Costs and benefits of abatement measures. Both datasets will be made available via a database, dashboard, explanatory guidelines, and overview reports.
Data Sets: The project will provide two datasets to the financial sector. The first is a comprehensive dataset that includes the monetary effects of losing ecosystem services at the sector-country/region level for different scenarios, including pollination services, soil quality, and additional ecosystem services. Second, is a dataset of abatement measures to restore or abate biodiversity loss, including implementation costs, capital investment requirements, and economic benefits in monetary terms.
Application: Financial sector companies will pilot test and utilize these estimates for risk management and stress test purposes, strategic and market purposes (market and financing, investment volumes), as well as reporting. and to identify key investment areas related to biodiversity.
Reports: The project’s outcomes will be regularly published and shared in reports accessible to the general public.
The project is initiated in response to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, agreed upon in December 2022. This framework sets ambitious targets for biodiversity conservation, restoration and adaptation. Specifically, this project aligns with targets 15, 18, and 19 of the Biodiversity Plan (former GBF):
Furthermore, this project responds to the goals of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which entered into force on 5 January 2023. This directive modernizes and strengthens the rules concerning the social and environmental information that companies have to report. EU law now requires all large and listed companies to disclose information on the risks and opportunities arising from social and environmental issues, as well as the impact of their activities on people and the environment.
Dr. Haki Pamuk, the scientific lead of the project at WUR, emphasized, “The financial sector needs to quantify biodiversity-related risks and opportunities like what has been done for climate change. This requires the development of a model and data platform, including quantified/monetary estimates for the risks related to ecosystem services loss, as well as costs and benefits of abatement measures.”
“To serve the demand of supervisors, regulators, investors, and the public, science-based biodiversity data and scenarios need to quickly be integrated into current risk and stress test, strategy, market and reporting processes of financial service institutions. I am excited about the data and scenario contribution this consortium will create at the intersection of NGFS, SBTN and TNFD, and am looking forward to leveraging our long-standing track record of operationalizing sustainability for the credible, fast and easy integration of material biodiversity impacts into standard financial service institutions’ processes”, adds Dr. Nicole Röttmer, FSI methodology lead of the project at Deloitte.