Our focus on restoring nature aims to help a critical mass of financial institutions integrate environmental risks, opportunities and impacts into their assessment of corporate performance and financing decisions. Alongside this, our workstreams aim to create actionable pathways for financial institutions to actively pursue the sustainable financing of credible opportunities to restore nature. |
We continue to pursue this objective with our members through ongoing research and collaborations:
Nature-related financial risks
Using the Handbook, CISL conducted five use cases with members of the Banking Environment Initiative and Investment Leaders Group to support further assessments by other financial institutions. These use cases quantify and assess specific nature-related financial risks, with each limited to a particular geography, risk type and sector and demonstrate the financial materiality of nature loss.
The materiality of the financial risks demonstrated also form the backbone for a new report Integrating nature: The case for action on nature-related financial risks. In this paper, CISL calls on finance leaders to act now to integrate nature into decision-making in order to manage nature-related risks and drive investment that protects and restores nature.
Banking Beyond Deforestation
To conclude the ‘Soft Commodities’ Compact, CISL published Banking Beyond Deforestation, sharing lessons from the Compact and detailing how the banking industry can help halt and reverse deforestation.
The Compact was a company-led alliance between the Banking Environment Initiative (BEI) and Consumer Goods Forum (CGF). In support of the 2010 CGF resolution on zero net deforestation, twelve banks in the Compact set out to reduce deforestation in the supply chains of their client base in four soft commodity supply chains: palm oil, timber products, soy and beef.
Trado: New technologies to fund fairer, more transparent supply chains
The Trado project aimed to demonstrate the transformative potential of harnessing digital innovation and financial technologies to improve the sustainability of global supply chains and trade finance.
The Trado model enables a sustainability ‘data-for-benefits’ swap between a buyer and a supplier in the supply chain using banks’ traditional supply chain financing. This swap, provides parties in the supply chain with reliable data about the supply chain’s sustainability properties, helping to unlock finance to reward first mile producers such as smallholder farmers for information on sustainability.
Catalysing Fintech for Sustainability: Lessons from multi-sector innovation
The application of financial technology (Fintech) stretches beyond the provision of financial services. The Fintech Taskforce was made up of nine financial institutions, three corporates and four innovative start-ups, to look at how fintech could help solve sustainability challenges. The group made eleven recommendations, informed by three use cases, publishing these in 2017.
This report is the output of the Fintech Taskforce (‘the Taskforce’), which was convened by the Banking Environment Initiative (BEI) in March 2017 for a six-month term. Its purpose is to share the Taskforce’s recommendations on how to design collaboration between multinationals, financial institutions and start-ups such that we better harness fintech to help solve sustainability challenges in the real economy.
Further CISL research contributing to restoring nature
25 February 2020
February 2020 - The Natural Capital Impact Group (NCIG) has launched a new case study showcasing how Anglian Water has developed a measurement framework for implementing its commitment to biodiversity net gain across the driest region of the United Kingdom.
The Catchment Management Declaration – Update
20 February 2020
20 February 2020 – Over 110 organisations have now signed up to the Catchment Management Declaration which aims to gather commitment and action for a multisector approach to catchment management. This update outlines the progress signatories have made and demonstrates the breadth of action being taken in support of the Declaration.
14 October 2019
22 October 2019 – A new study has shown that when given clear social and environmental performance data, consumers display an appetite for sustainable investment even with lower returns.
18 February 2019
22 February 2019 – The ClimateWise Transition Risk Framework provides an open-source, step-by-step methodology on how to manage the risks and capture emerging opportunities from the low carbon transition.
19 December 2018
The Investment Leaders Group (ILG) has developed an original framework to allow the industry to quantify investment impacts. Our aim is to enable a ‘revolution’ in consumer choice in financial services. This means making the social and environmental impacts of investment transparent to financial consumers in the same way that health and other concerns are apparent to food consumers today.
Environmental risk analysis by financial institutions – a review of global practice
2 September 2016
September 2016 – The G20’s new Green Finance Study Group asked the Cambridge Centre for Sustainable Finance to serve as Knowledge Partner and make recommendations on how to integrate environmental risk into mainstream financial decision-making.
