The mission of WWF, the global conservation organization, is to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to the diversity of life on Earth. The organization operates across 100 countries to help preserve our planet’s natural resources and protect and restore wildlife and their habits. WWF’s sustainable finance team engages with governments, corporations, and the finance sector to advocate for sustainable finance policy reform and to develop tools and standards that safeguard the environment, supported by research.

In 2020, WWF partnered with us to develop a white paper titled “Incorporating Sustainability Into Infrastructure,” which examined how climate and nature-related factors are applied in the infrastructure investment process.

For the latest white paper in 2024, "Biodiversity and Infrastructure Investing: How Infrastructure Investors Are Factoring Biodiversity Impacts Into Decision-Making", we collaborated again to create a global infrastructure investor survey, conduct direct interviews, and perform an in-depth literature review. The paper is also supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)–funded Asia's Linear Infrastructure safeGuarding Nature (ALIGN) Project, which aims to enhance the development and implementation of effective, high-quality linear infrastructure safeguards that protect people and nature from harm. 

This comprehensive approach identified five key areas of focus:

• Infrastructure impacts on biodiversity loss and physical and transition risk exposure
• The increase in awareness of and action to address biodiversity loss
• Investors’ current practices, including approaches, frameworks, and metrics used in the decision-making process
• Factors driving further progress, such as barriers and key actions
• Best practice case studies throughout the investment lifecycle

The white paper’s findings reveal that infrastructure investors increasingly incorporated biodiversity and other environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics into their decision-making processes. There are three clear reasons to act more urgently: biodiversity loss is a crisis comparable to climate change, progress is achievable now with low barriers to inclusion, and a nature-positive transition will create new opportunities, such as biodiversity credit markets.

The white paper aims to increase awareness of biodiversity issues caused by infrastructure development. It seeks to drive relevant organizations, including infrastructure funds, transaction advisors, development finance institutes, and financing banks, to integrate biodiversity considerations into their decision-making processes. Ultimately, this effort aims to promote more environmentally sustainable investment.

The joint WWF-Oliver Wyman effort concluded that increasing awareness and action on biodiversity has not yet led to widespread assessment of biodiversity risk exposures and impacts in infrastructure. We anticipate that investors will increase their considerations over the next one to two years, supported by this research and a growing awareness of available biodiversity frameworks and metrics. This shift is expected to follow a pattern similar to the rapid uptake of climate change considerations in investment decision-making.