summary
The financial system is being increasingly portrayed as central to securing green transitions. Goal D of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) calls for “aligning financial flows with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the 2050 Vision for biodiversity” and target 15 calls for ensuring that large and transnational companies and financial institutions “progressively reduce negative impacts on biodiversity, increase positive impacts, reduce biodiversity-related risks to business and financial institutions, and promote actions to ensure sustainable patterns of production”. In anticipation of and in response to such demands, financial actors are mobilizing biodiversity knowledge in unprecedented ways in the history of the financial sector. Financial actors need and use biodiversity knowledge as well as assemblages of biodiversity-economic-financial knowledge to measure and report their biodiversity footprints, quantify biodiversity-related financial risks, set and measure progress against nature targets, and create biodiversity-positive investment vehicles. Due to their ability to generate quantifications, mathematical models of biodiversity, the economy, and the financial system feature prominently among the forms of knowledge deployed by financial actors to respond to these global agreements and increasing regional and national sustainability-related disclosure regulations. This project aims to investigate the different modalities in which biodiversity, economic, and financial models participate in knowledge-, decision-, and policy-making in sustainable finance as well as the possible impacts on nature, local communities, and broader allocations of resources, risks, responsibilities, and legitimacy that these model-based knowledges, decisions, and policies give rise to.
team
Prof. dr. Esther Turnhout, Dr. Casey Lynch, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and Klaudia Prodani.
Project duration: 1 October 2022 – 31 September 2026.
who's working on this project
Contact: Klaudia Prodani
Photo credit header: The Wall Street Bull in stained glass. From the cover of The Market as God by Harvey Cox (2016).