Category: Mainstream

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Investing in biodiversity

What do investors think of biodiversity? Well, a new report from Credit Suisse and Responsible Investor says that they’re increasingly interested, but that they are not (yet) putting their money where their mouths are. The reason?

Investors are struggling to identify and consider biodiversity-linked investment opportunities. Biodiversity needs to be made more digestible and measurable for investor concerns to translate into investment action…

More digestible? Now there’s an opportunity for agricultural biodiversity at least.

The challenge of protecting wildlife and nature has fallen behind many other sustainability issues for investors and governments alike. Part of the explanation likely lies in the complexity of biodiversity and its loss. “Diversity is the opposite of investors’ desire for standardisation and comparability of things,” says Piet Klop, Senior Advisor Responsible Investment, PGGM. “Biodiversity is challenging because it really is the anti-commodity.”

Ah yes, functioning ecosystems and food as anti-commodities. Can we not muster some decent arguments against this pernicious view?

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Nibbles: Apple diversity, Quinoa diversity, Potato diversity, Indian coconut, Mead recipe

  1. The need to diversify apple breeding.
  2. Unlikely pean to the world quinoa core collection. I believe we may have blogged about it.
  3. And the Commonwealth Potato Collection rounds off today’s trifecta of cool genebanks.
  4. Kerala’s coconut problems only start with root wilt. Aren’t there coconut collections that could be used to solve them? Well of course there are.
  5. Recreating bochet, a medieval mead, sounds really hard, but worth it. Someone want to start a mead collection?
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Nibbles: Deforestation, Grizzly genetics, Animal domestication, Wheat drones, Okra experiments, Millet survey, The Common Table

  1. 26 million hectares of forest were lost in 2020.
  2. Genetic groups in grizzly bears line up with Indigenous languages in British Columbia. How about the trees, though?
  3. But why weren’t grizzly bears domesticated? Because they’re not friendly, feedable, fecund and family-friendly.
  4. Drones and wheat breeding.
  5. Crowdsourcing okra evaluation. No drones involved.
  6. Health-conscious urban Indians eat millet for health reasons. Goes great with okra.
  7. The Common Table: sharing stories about reforming the food system. Like a couple of the above.