Global investment manager Federated Hermes announced today the launch of a Biodiversity Equity Fund in affiliation with the UK’s Natural History Museum. The new fund aims to invest in a portfolio of companies that are helping to preserve and restore biodiversity.

Federated Hermes outlined six key themes for the fund, addressing major biodiversity threats, including land pollution, marine pollution and exploitation, unsustainable living, climate change, unsustainable farming, and deforestation. Businesses aligned with the fund’s themes support mitigate the loss of, or provide solutions to, the specific biodiversity risk they bear and each of them has sub-verticals aligned to specific UN SDGs.

The fund, which is classed at Article 9 under SFDR criteria, will be managed by Ingrid Kukuljan, Head of Impact and Sustainable Investing, Federated Hermes. Kukuljan, said:

“The negative impacts of biodiversity loss pose a systemic risk to the global economy and we must stop taking nature’s permanence for granted. We believe now is a crucial moment to invest in the companies that help mitigate biodiversity decline. We are convinced that there is a cohort of quality, investible, stocks which provide investors profitable access to this megatrend.”

Federated Hermes and the Natural History Museum stated that they have been working together to explore how the Museum’s biodiversity experts and data scientists can help build the bridge between biodiversity impacts and products and services that investment companies enable.

The Museum has developed Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII), a metric that estimates the loss of biodiversity across an area and provides a figure for what percentage of the area’s natural ecological community still persists there. The BII data is available through Biodiversity Trends Explorer, an online tool enabling users to compare the state of local ecosystem biodiversity among countries. This data will be used to help support and inform investment decisions for the strategy.

Dr. Doug Gurr, The Natural History Museum’s Director said:

“We are delighted to see the launch of this fund encouraging investment in companies that are helping to preserve and restore biodiversity, and thrilled to see Federated Hermes adopting the Museum’s Biodiversity Trends Explorer. Together we can bend the curve of biodiversity loss and create a world in which both people and planet can thrive.”