S&P Global’s ESG and sustainability-focused business Sustainable1 announced today the launch of its new Nature & Biodiversity Risk portfolio assessment services, aimed at enabling financial institutions to understand and assess portfolio nature-related risks.

The new service comes as businesses and financial institutions increasingly focus on nature and biodiversity risk, and as global efforts to address nature-related issues begin to pick up pace. In December 2022, for example, global governments adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at the COP15 UN Biodiversity Conference, agreeing to a set of goals aimed at ending biodiversity loss, protecting natural ecosystems and ramping biodiversity-related financing.

S&P’s new service will leverage its recently launched Nature & Biodiversity Risk dataset, which lets companies and investors to assess, manage and address nature-related risks and impacts, covering over 17,000 companies and more than 1.6 million assets, using nature-related risk metrics such as The Ecosystem Footprint (measuring the land area, ecosystem degradation, and ecosystem significance) to deliver a deeper understanding of a company’s impact and dependency on nature.

According to the company, the new service will allow financial institutions to understand and explore nature-related impacts and dependencies in their portfolios, as recommended by the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and in line with the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) approach.