GIST Impact is collaborating with Global Canopy to encourage investors and banks to factor deforestation into their financial decisions, driving capital towards outcomes that benefit both people and the planet.
This partnership enables banks and financial institutions to manage deforestation-related risks in their portfolios using Global Canopy’s Forest IQ and Forest 500 datasets along with GIST Impact’s platform.
The Forest IQ dataset provides detailed assessments of how 2,400 large companies address their involvement with deforestation risk, examining their exposure through commodity supply chains, materiality, and performance reporting. Additionally, the Forest 500 database ranks 500 companies and 150 financial institutions based on their policies and performance regarding deforestation risk. This ranking helps investors identify organizations with significant deforestation risk and encourages them to improve environmental practices.
With these datasets integrated into the GIST Impact platform, financial institutions can identify exposure, assess materiality, and evaluate corporate governance effectiveness in tackling deforestation. This integration allows them to incorporate deforestation-related data into their decision-making and engagement strategies, advancing both climate and nature transitions.
Pavan Sukhdev, founder and CEO of GIST Impact, states: “Deforestation has long harmed the GDP of the underserved, resulting in livelihood loss and biodiversity decline. It has now also emerged as a material financial risk that investors must address. By integrating Global Canopy’s datasets into our platform, we equip investors with the tools to effectively quantify, compare, and manage deforestation-related risks. This partnership enhances rigor and transparency in an area of ESG that has traditionally lacked clarity.”
Niki Mardas, executive director at Global Canopy, adds: “This collaboration will broaden the reach of our deforestation data, enabling organizations to measure and understand their impact on nature and society. Protecting forests is essential for achieving nature and biodiversity targets and is crucial for minimizing future business risk.”