The Ecogain Biodiversity Index (EBI) has in recent years examined the sustainability reports of the largest Swedish, Nordic and Baltic companies and how they report on biodiversity. Now the report is expanding to include companies from across Europe, looking at companies such as Volkswagen, Nestlé, Siemens and BP.
The increased number of companies is made possible by an automated data collection that was developed in close collaboration between Knowit and Ecogain ahead of EBI 2021. The expansion of companies will continue and already this autumn a measurement of 100 companies will be carried out on Nasdaq in the US.
This year's European ECI will review a total of around 500 companies, distributed as follows:
- The 300 largest companies in Europe
- The 100 largest companies in the Nordic region
- The 100 largest companies in Sweden
Last year, Sweden's Vattenfall topped both the Swedish and Nordic lists, followed by Finland's Fortum and Boliden. It remains to be seen whether these rankings will stand up to this year's expanded field.
Unlike Sweden, we see that several countries in Europe as well as the United States have started to apply market-based systems for companies that want to reduce and balance their impact on nature. The UK Environment Bill from 2021 is an example of legislation that has put biodiversity on the agenda. Habitat Banking is one of the market solutions that we see emerging for companies to value and offset their impact on biodiversity. It will be very interesting to see if these solutions start to influence corporate reporting. Perhaps the results from EBI can support the emergence of market-based solutions for biodiversity in Sweden as well
- Fredrik Höök, CEO of Ecogain.
Many companies that have a clear direct impact on the land, such as those in the mining, energy and forestry sectors, have started to integrate biodiversity into their business. Business models that are further away from nature do not have as obvious a link to biodiversity at first glance. At the same time, companies in the financial industry, for example, have huge impacts on, and risks linked to, biodiversity in their value chains, through how investments are managed in relation to the footprints of commodity production and energy supply.
Major financial players, such as BNP Paribas in France and Handelsbanken in Sweden, have begun to take steps to assess the risks and opportunities of biodiversity, which could generate interesting results in this year's report.
Following the 2021 EBI report, Nasdaq partnered with Ecogain to include biodiversity data from the EBI in a newly established ESG Data Hub, a platform of sustainability data to inform investor decisions. This and other financial industry initiatives on biodiversity, as well as regulatory frameworks such as the EU Taxonomy and the new Global Biodiversity Targets, are expected to put even more focus on the issue.
The next few years' EBI reports will show whether companies succeed in prioritizing the issue of biodiversity on a par with the issue of climate change, as neither of the two major social issues can be solved without the other. The Ecogain Biodiversity Index is released on the occasion of Biodiversity Day.
Ecogain Biodiversity Index
Nasdaq ESG Data Hub
