Work Streams

The Natural Value Initiative

A key barrier to minimizing private sector impacts on the environment is the failure of the financial markets to adequately value the environmental and social impacts of goods and services. Despite a rapid growth in socially responsible investment in financial markets, environmental risk awareness within mainstream investment practices is lacking.

UNEP Finance Initiative, international environmental NGO Fauna & Flora International, and the Brazilian business school FGV are leading a collaboration to address this issue by raising awareness of the links between biodiversity, investment value and the finance sector.

The Natural Value Initiative (NVI) aims to offer investors a toolkit to enable them to evaluate biodiversity impacts and ecosystem services dependency within the food, beverage and tobacco (FBT) sectors.

These sectors are especially dependent on the ecosystem services provided by biodiversity. The toolkit will be trialled by a range of finance institutions with substantial active investments in FBT sector companies, and will be launched publicly late in 2008.

The NVI is funded primarily by the Dutch Ministry of Environment.

To find out more about the NVI, visit http://www.naturalvalueinitiative.org/