The collective goal of this partnership is to make deforestation analysis the norm at every financial institution.
Data and analytics platform GIST Impact will work with Global Canopy to encourage investors and banks to consider deforestation when making financial decisions and drive capital towards outcomes that benefit both people and the planet.
Banks and other financial players will now be able to manage deforestation-related risks in their portfolios, leveraging Global Canopy's Forest IQ and Forest 500 datasets and GIST Impact's platform to influence decisions.
Global Canopy's Forest IQ dataset provides detailed assessments of how 2,400 large companies are addressing their involvement in deforestation risk, based on their exposure through commodity supply chains, materiality, and performance reporting on addressing their exposure.
The ForestIQ database also ranks the 500 companies and 150 financial institutions most influential in the deforestation space, based on their policies and performance related to deforestation risk. This ranking can support investors spot organisations with substantial deforestation risk and work with them to improve their environmental practices.
Now that these datasets are integrated into the GIST Impact platform, financial institutions can identify exposure, assess materiality, and evaluate the effectiveness of corporate governance in addressing deforestation. Further, with financial institutions now integrating deforestation-related data into their decision-making and engagement strategies, they can progress on both climate and nature transitions at once.
Pavan Sukhdev, founder and CEO, GIST Impact, says: "Deforestation has always been a blow to the GDP of the poor, a livelihood loss and a loss of biodiversity. However, it has now also become a material financial risk that investors must account for. By integrating Global Canopy’s Forest IQ and Forest 500 datasets into our platform, we’re giving investors the tools to quantify, compare, and act on deforestation-related risks with confidence and clarity. This partnership brings rigour, scale, and science to an area of ESG that has too often lacked transparency.
Niki Mardas, executive director, at Global Canopy adds: "This partnership will amplify the reach of Global Canopy’s deforestation data and allow organisations to measure and quantify their impact on nature and society. Protecting forests is central to nature and biodiversity targets and crucial to safeguard future business risk."