Progress on nature disclosures are a critical step forward towards solving biodiversity loss and climate challenge

Storebrand Asset Management has become an inaugural TNFD Early Adopter. This means that Storebrand will start making disclosures aligned with the TNFD Recommendations in its corporate reporting by financial year 2024.

- Biodiversity loss was a breakthrough topic last year in within our sector, after what has been a long battle for many of us advocating for the issue. But now, this issue is increasingly being understood to rank alongside climate change — and to be intrinsically linked to solving it -as areas of significant systemic risk for investors, says Jan Erik Saugestad, CEO Storebrand Asset Management and adds;

- We have already started to implement the TNFD methodology in our portfolios to better understand our nature-related risks and opportunities and are committed to publish our first TNFD disclosures from 2025, based on 2024 data.

Four organizations initially partnered to create the TNFD: Global Canopy, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEPFI) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Since September 2020, 74 members, including Storebrand, formed an Informal Working Group (IWG) in order to prepare the launch of the TNFD.

This move arose from an urgent need to recognize that nature underpins the global economy — and that our economies are embedded within nature, not external to it. The purpose of TNFD is to establish a foundation for consistent and comparable assessment and reporting on nature by businesses worldwide.

- We encourage businesses to take action now, as it is only a matter of time before these recommendations become requirements, as we are seeing with the TCFD. The European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive for Biodiversity and Ecosystems requires similar disclosures from 2025 (based on 2024). An estimated 60,000 businesses will be affected globally, Saugestad concludes.

The recommendations are modelled on climate disclosure guidelines developed by a separate task force in 2017, and are consistent with global sustainability standards of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), as well as the impact materiality approach used by the Global Reporting Initiative. They also align with Target 15 reporting requirements under the Global Biodiversity Framework approved last December in Montreal.

The full list of inaugural TNFD Early Adopters will be published on the TNFD Adopters page on the 16th of January at 13:15pm CET.