A decade of positive impact: resilient finance with ASN Bank and PRé
Nature underpins the global economy. As explained in a World Economic Forum (WEF) report in 2020, more than half of global GDP depends on healthy ecosystems such as fertile soils, clean water, pollination, and climate regulation. Yet these same ecosystems are being degraded by human activity, including the way capital is allocated through lending and investment activities. As biodiversity declines, these essential services are at risk, which creates financial vulnerabilities across sectors. For financial institutions, the biodiversity effect of their activities is both a material risk and a strategic opportunity. As financial portfolios both impact nature and depend on it, biodiversity integration needs to be a cornerstone of future-proof finance.
Addressing biodiversity impacts is a longstanding ambition of ASN Bank
In 2015, ASN Bank started addressing the biodiversity and nature impacts stemming from its activities. The aim of the bank is to go beyond managing risks, instead striving to actively contribute to the preservation and regeneration of ecosystems and position finance as a driver of positive change.
Throughout the years, PRé Sustainability’s role has been to support ASN’s ambition and help turn this vision into practice. To do so, we have developed several methodologies and measurement approaches to assess biodiversity impacts and nature dependencies of its portfolio. We also brought together the insights of these assessments to provide a dual perspective to ASN Bank:
- how its investments impact nature, and
- how its portfolio is exposed to risks if ecosystems degrade.
This integrated view is essential for risk identification and management; it benefits client engagement and improves complete understanding of the links between finance and nature. It also opens the door to identifying finance opportunities. That is, rather than focusing only on risk avoidance, ASN Bank began identifying investment themes that can strengthen resilience and create long-term value for nature. This includes regenerative agriculture, sustainable forestry, and circular economy solutions.
Turning vision into practice: a long-term collaboration between PRé and ASN Bank
In the past 10 years, we achieved the following key milestones together:
- Biodiversity footprint methodology. The very first milestone was the development of Biodiversity Footprinting for Financial Institutions (BFFI), better known as the biodiversity footprinting methodology, together with ASN Bank and CREM. The results of this provided a quantitative measure of ASN’s portfolio biodiversity impact. Throughout the years, we have kept refining the methodology and streamlining the footprint process, making biodiversity assessment scalable and efficient.
- Common ground in measurement for the finance sector. ASN Bank was one of the founders of the Partnership for Biodiversity Accounting Financials (PBAF) standard. This was a follow-up from their earlier Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF) initiative. PRé contributed to the PBAF standard, which was largely based on the BFFI methodology and our experiences in applying it to the ASN Bank portfolio. This is one step toward building consensus and comparability of the biodiversity footprint measurement approach among financial institutions.
- Ecosystem services dependency assessment. Moving beyond impact on biodiversity, ASN Bank also wanted to understand the potential nature-related dependencies and risks associated with its financing activities. We used the ENCORE tool to assess the dependencies of ASN Bank’s financial portfolio on ecosystem services. From this, we learned the most material ecosystem services the portfolio depends on, at both the sector level and the investee level. This allowed ASN Bank to understand the risks of its exposure to ecosystem services and gain insight into which parts of the portfolio are highly dependent on nature.
- Positive biodiversity impact methodology. ASN Impact Investors has a long track record of investing in activities that have a positive contribution to nature, such as sustainable forestry and agriculture. To help them better understand and quantify that impact, PRé collaborated with them in 2019 on a methodology that builds on the BFFI to calculate the positive impact on biodiversity. This report was commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality and The Netherlands Enterprise Agency. Again, the aim was to work towards standardized definitions and measurement of positive impact. With the launch of the ASN Biodiversity Fund, we have applied and further developed the methodology to calculate the positive impacts of the fund.
Calculating biodiversity footprints in the banking sector
These steps have positioned ASN as one of the first financial institutions to operationalize biodiversity-forward decision making across its portfolio. Furthermore, the evolution from biodiversity impact to nature dependency shows how biodiversity assessments can serve as a strategic lens for innovation, resilience, and value creation for all stakeholders involved. It also helps meet nature and compliance requirements such as the double materiality assessment required by the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
Looking ahead
As our collaboration with ASN demonstrates, integrating biodiversity into finance can support decisions for nature conservation efforts and help prioritize mitigation actions for nature-related risks. By developing biodiversity footprint methodologies, conducting dependency assessments, and aligning approaches with sector-wide standards, ASN has laid the foundation for its next steps in biodiversity. We are excited to be ASN Bank’s partner in its biodiversity journey and look forward to continuing to support its ambitions.
Together, we are proving that financial institutions can be agents of positive change, leading the transition towards a nature-positive, future-proof economy.
Key terms
- Biodiversity impact assessment: measuring how investments affect biodiversity and ecosystems.
- Biodiversity footprint: a quantitative indicator of an institution’s overall biodiversity impact.
- Dependency assessment: analysis of how and the extent to which economic activities rely on ecosystem services.
- BFFI: Biodiversity Footprint for Financial Institutions, a methodology co-developed with ASN Bank and CREM.
- PBAF: Partnership for Biodiversity Accounting Financials, an initiative aligning biodiversity accounting methods across the financial sector.
- ENCORE: An open-source tool that links ecosystem services to sectors and business activities.
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