A new investment coalition is aiming to mobilise $10bn (€8bn) towards “natural capital” themes across asset classes by 2022.
HSBC Pollination Climate Asset Management, Lombard Odier and Mirova, an affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers, are the three founding partners of the Natural Capital Investment Alliance, which has been established by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales under his Sustainable Markets Initiative.
Speaking at a biodiversity summit today, the Prince of Wales said: “The interdependence between human health and planetary health has never been more clear. For so many of the problems we face, nature, with the benefit of billions of years of evolution, has already provided us with the solutions.”
The royal said he had created the alliance “to help us arrive at a common language on natural capital investment so that we can start putting money to work and improve the flow of capital”.
There is no single definition of natural capital, but according to the Natural Capital Coalition a harmonised definition is that it is “another term for the stock of renewable and non-renewable resources (e.g. plants, animals, air, water, soils, minerals) that combine to yield a flow of benefits to people”.
According to an announcement about the new alliance, half of global GDP depends on such resources, but there are currently only a limited number of initiatives to promote nature as an investment opportunity.
“To seize the scale of this opportunity, a finance-led approach is needed to integrate natural capital as an investment theme across different asset classes, as well as improved investor-centric descriptions of natural capital investment opportunities,” the statement continued. ”That is the purpose of this newly formed Alliance.”
The other goals of the Alliance, besides the $10bn mobilisation objective, are:
- “to serve as a central hub for global corporations and financial institutions seeking to scale-up their investments into natural capital, in support of biodiversity restoration, including through carbon offsets”;
- “to share investment knowledge and expertise to help mainstream the natural capital investment theme and demonstrate scalability of appropriate vehicles and the multiple opportunities across asset classes”.
The three founding partners have launched or developed specific vehicles or strategies for investments in natural capital.
HSBC Pollination Climate Asset Management, a joint venture unveiled in August last year, is establishing a series of funds for directly investing in the preservation, protection and enhancement of nature.
Lombard Odier launched a global equities investment strategy for natural capital last year and Mirova has established a platform proposing strategies in the field of land restoration, blue economy and forest protection with more than 30 experts.
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