Pictet forges new four-year biodiversity research partnership

Pictet Asset Management has been selected as a founding partner for a new four-year global research programme geared to helping the financial industry develop strategies to protect natural capital and halt biodiversity loss.

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 the only asset management company in the Biodiversity Finance (BIOFIN) programme, chosen for its track record in “innovative thinking” in sustainable finance.

As an ‘Impact Partner’, Pictet AM’s role is to provide investment expertise and to contribute to transdisciplinary 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. More details can be found here.

The BIOFIN programme has been devised to integrate the protection and restoration of natural capital into financial and investment decision making worldwide.

Although biodiversity loss is one of the gravest environmental threats the world faces, monitoring it has proved difficult due to a lack of reliable data and measurement standards. According to the World Wildlife Fund, failure to protect natural ecosystems could wipe USD10 trillion from the global economy by the middle of this century.

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.