Six months after the launch of the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge, the Finance for Biodiversity Foundation has been set up to support the call to action and collaboration between signatories to the Pledge. The Foundation provides an organizational structure, helping to speed up progress and collaboration on the commitments made in the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge.
One lesson of the past year is that it’s only by working together that we can get through a crisis. At NextGreen, we enjoy working with the dialogue method, as given to us by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
For Buber, equality is an essential basis for productive cooperation. Dialogue is a key concept for him. In a dialogue, speaking and listening are in balance with each other and attention is focused on perspectives and responses. Through this interaction, the dialogue partners can connect to their deeper sources. Hidden wisdom can be discovered by speaking and listening together. Through the interaction and the process of searching for answers together, creativity is released and new insights can emerge that we can build on. The dialogue therefore becomes greater than just the sum of its parts.
Following our recent visual story ‘Finance and climate adaptation’, we thought it was time to update our earlier inventory ‘Financial incentives for climate adaptation’ which we published in 2018. We made the weblinks work again and added some new examples. As well as the visual story ‘Making the Netherlands more climate robust – what role do financial institutions play?’ in which we link to the inventory, the forthcoming model for decision support on financial incentives has also benefited from this update.
Together with the EU Finance@Biodiversity Community and the signatories of the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge, we have developed a Guide to measuring biodiversity for financial institutions. As the loss of biodiversity becomes ever more urgent, financial institutions are looking for ways to quantify the impact of their finance and investment activities on biodiversity. The Guide on biodiversity measurement approaches provides a comprehensive overview of the biodiversity measurement tools that are currently in use and underway. The Guide will be presented in a webinar on April 1st, 2-3pm CET.
A new visual story about climate adaptation highlights the opportunities for collaboration between financial institutions and the public sector. Based on 20 interviews with financial institutions and public sector bodies, we analysed the role of financial institutions in climate adaptation as part of our Finance and Climate Adaptation project. We have now delivered the final product: a visual story that highlights the actions that financial institutions can take to make its assets in the Netherlands more climate-proof, and how they can optimize their collaboration with the public sector.
