Click here to add your own text​

Today, on World Environment Day, we reflect on the latest round of negotiations towards a Global Plastic Pollution Treaty and what financial markets should take away from the discussions.

To have any hope of limiting climate heating to 1.50C: stopping deforestation and cutting methane emissions by 45% before 2030 are essential to meet our interlinked climate, nature and development goals and significantly reduce the food system’s GhG footprint. Transforming the energy system alone will not be sufficient.

Unfortunately, many financial institutions have been ignoring the problems of deforestation and methane emissions for far too long. 61% of financial institutions covered by Global Canopy’s latest Forest 500 survey do not have any policies to tackle deforestation in their lending or investment portfolios. With only seven years left to achieve these targets, action must be taken now.

If you’re looking for a job where compensation can be linked to your impact, consider becoming Head of Traceability (HoT), especially at a nature-dependent company.
We found only 18 companies with a Head of Traceability – excluding companies whose business is to sell traceability solutions and government agencies. By comparison, there are at least 10,000 Heads of Sustainability on LinkedIn. One of the possible reasons why HoTs are a rare species could be that it exposes management to more searching questions from financial institutions, which should be engaging with company executives and enquiring where the traceability function sits within their management structure.

The IPCC Sixth Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all. It demonstrates a clear recognition of the interconnection between nature and climate. A number of intertwined factors need to be addressed by policymakers alongside climate change. This includes nature and its ecosystems.

Decarbonisation is a business imperative for companies looking to remain competitive in the long term. As such, organisations must develop a clear understanding of their current carbon footprint and devise strategies for reducing and ultimately eliminating their emissions. According to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) this ‘climate transition process’ has set over 1,600 companies on a 30-year journey to Net Zero. Planet Tracker, has developed a disclosure assessment template which can be used by investors and lenders to determine the credibility of a company’s climate transition plan.

The United Nations (UN) 2023 Water Conference in New York from 22 to 24 March 2023 will be the first UN Conference to focus strictly on water since 1977. It builds on the momentum generated by frameworks such as the Paris Agreement and the Global Biodiversity Framework. Commonly traded food products consume vastly different amounts of water. This blog examines how much water major food products require and exposes this hidden trade network. For example, cocoa beans consume 100 times as much total water as sugar crops. Beef, the most water-intensive animal derived product, consumes about 3 to 4 times more than chicken or pork.

Perhaps the most discussed fashion event of the year will be the Oscars – the Academy Awards – red carpet parade on 12 March 2023, with live streamed blogs of the fashion choices on show and much discussion in subsequent press coverage.

But one of the biggest challenges facing the fashion industry in its move towards greater sustainability is changing the way we consume fashion and a red carpet outfit is often the antithesis of a sustainable fashion choice.

In the Planet Tracker Valuing the Food system dashboard, the user is able to adjust various valuation variables. We provide two main valuation approaches: Scenario 1 (S1) based on the number of businesses and Scenario 2 (S2) based on the protein price (both discussed in more detail in ‘How much is your food worth?‘).

Deforestation regulation in the EU is likely to be adopted in the next 12 months requiring EU importers to confirm that cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya, wood and derived products are deforestation-free. This Regulation asks a major question of importing corporates as to whether they have traceability within their supply chains and has the potential to disrupt corporates which do not have traceability and responsible sourcing embedded within their supply chain.

One indicator of the importance of a topic to investment managers is whether it features on the agenda at annual shareholder meetings. So where does biodiversity rank? How does it compare with the climate agenda? This blog shows that biodiversity is rarely discussed – although there are signs this will change.

Valuing the global food system is challenging. Planet Tracker has set out to do this by analysing 400,000 companies connected to food. We estimate the asset value of the system is c. USD 14 trillion, with revenues in the region of USD 15 to 19 trillion (equivalent to c. 20% of global GDP). This is how we did it.

Recently concerns have been raised that corporates are ‘greenhushing’, when organisations deliberately choose to hide their green or ESG credentials from public view. Is this an indication that civil society or investors have gone too far in their demands for sustainability metrics, leaving management teams cautious about declaring their progress on green or sustainability issues, or the next step in the evolvement of increasingly sophisticated greenwashing?

Next month, formal negotiations will start on a legally binding treaty to end plastic pollution. Although there appears to be little disagreement about the pervasiveness of plastic pollution, how to resolve this will prove problematic. Who should take responsibility for the present situation and how should this influence future responsibilities?

Proponents of digital fashion suggest that it offers one potential answer to how to move the fashion industry to a more sustainable footing. This blog considers what digital fashion means and why we do not expect it to reduce the need for the industry to make significant structural changes if it is to move to a sustainable footing.

Food supply chains are coming under heavy stress due to the conflict in Ukraine building on an already high inflation environment. This has pushed food security to the top of national agendas, alongside energy. This blog explores whether this will result in a food supply chain decoupling and a shift towards shorter supply chains and ‘friendly’ jurisdictions (‘friend-shoring’).

Just as sustainability standard setters are consolidating into the more powerful International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), an influential participant, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), has recommended improved disclosures for plastics risks and opportunities.

Food and politics remain closely connected. Non-democratic countries are more likely to impose food export restrictions while the leading nature dependent exporters are resisting trade controls.

Celebrating World Biodiversity Day on 22 May,, we imagine how time and money spent on the creation of the much-hyped metaverse – persistent virtual worlds that combine aspects of the digital and physical worlds – could be used to build the ‘natureverse’, a perfect mirroring of the physical world (nature) by persistent digital worlds (financial markets).

What could happen if next generation materials replace animal-sourced materials. Can the cow actually be disrupted by these next generation leathers? What are the unintended consequences if this happens faster than expected? And what are the systemic implications?

The invasion of Ukraine has pushed sovereign states to reflect on the types of governments with which they trade. Recently, many democratic governments have been assessing their sources of non-renewable natural capital trade – notably oil & gas as well as metals & ores. In this blog, Planet Tracker focuses on the trade of key renewable agricultural exports such as cereals, meat, dairy and seafood and maps their sources by political systems.

Companies that do not have full visibility over their supply chains cannot fully control or mitigate the environmental and reputational risks they face. However, buying soy that has been certified as deforestation-free by an independent certifier is a simple step for companies to take.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are the world’s top plastic polluting brands and therefore their recycling targets deserve scrutiny. We believe that investors should have little confidence in these goals and financial institutions should share the blame for this.

Supporters of deep-sea mining promise to provide the materials needed for a decarbonised future by extracting key metals from the seabed. However, the environmental effects of deep-sea mining have shown catastrophic and irreversible implications for biodiversity.

Plastic producers and major asset managers are not signing up to the UN Plastic Pollution Treaty

Zombie data, data that are false, unverifiable or lack credibility, have become all too en vogue. From fake news to corporate greenwashing, zombie data have been used to mislead or for monetary gain. This is particularly apparent in the fashion industry which many claim has a serious misinformation problem. This blog examines how zombie data concerning the environmental impacts of the textiles supply chain present a financial risk to capital markets investors.

Supply chain disruptions were front page news in 2021, highlighting an urgent need for companies to be able to track products along their supply chains. Management teams sometimes resist implementing traceability systems arguing they are too costly. But are such systems the cost of doing business or a nice to have?

These predictions for 2022 from the Planet Tracker Team are specifically relevant to the global financial markets.

A revival of calls for a global plastic treaty is encouraging. There is a general recognition that there is a global plastic pollution problem, however, despite previous attempts to tackle this, little progress has been made. This time it looks more positive. Negotiating positions are coalescing and a timetable to move forward is solidifying. Planet Tracker examines the state of play.

To feed 10 billion people in 2050 will require a lot of protein and from a land-use perspective, plants provide the most efficient way to produce this. But this means that as well as shifting our diets we will need to increase crop yields and this will require nitrogen.

What messages should financial institutions be taking away from last week’s United Nation Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) in Kunming?

• After two decades of negotiations, a partial ban on capacity-enhancing (i.e., harmful) fisheries subsidies

Globally, financial regulators are quite rightly investigating sustainability claims made by asset managers. Investors have

The listing of approximately 8% of Raízen for R$ 7 billion (USD 1.4 billion) looks

Shorting should be part of a sustainable investor’s toolkit; Planet Tracker views this as compatible

This blog explores how the same biotechnological improvements that are contributing to the rapid growth in alternative food proteins are also opening new possibilities for textiles and materials.

The new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released this week is categorical – climate change is real and the impacts are being experienced today, not at some point in the future.

Why should sustainable investors be interested in Vanguard, a USD 8 trillion asset manager, buying

A first of its kind collaboration between IPBES and IPCC, the two intergovernmental organizations addressing biodiversity loss and climate change, means they are using their respective science-policy platforms to align these two important efforts more closely.

On World Ocean Day, Planet Tracker investigates the fate of fishing vessels that are past their ’use by’ date. As fishing fleets across the world age, they are likely to be beached, which destroys ecosystems and costs human lives.

The role of a robust second-hand market to increase the useful lifetime of clothing has become a central tenet of circular fashion. Who will be the winners of the resale boom?

A revision of the Japanese Corporate Governance Code has been proposed and includes a greater focus on sustainability. Yet Japanese companies already have a high rate of sustainability reporting. The opposite is true for biodiversity though. Excluding biodiversity is a missed opportunity.

Governments are setting the scene for international discussions in 2021 with major power blocks involved – China, EU, UK, US – under the auspices of the G20.

Although BlackRock has become increasing vocal about climate change in recent years, natural capital impacts are now on its engagement menu. We applaud them for this move.

February saw H&M jump on fashion’s latest trend, as they issued a €500m sustainability-linked bond which they will use to meet their 2025 sustainability targets.

At the end of last week, EU legislators reached an agreement on the expenditure of EUR 6.1 billion (USD 7.4 billion) which is to be allocated to fisheries and aquaculture for 2021 to 2027.

Formosa Petrochemical Corp’s USD 10 billion single-use plastics Sunshine Project facility in Louisiana had its licence suspended by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on 4 November 2020. Now, major construction has stopped.

The UK exports most of its seafood catch to EU neighbours and then imports fish for domestic consumption

California has just leapt ahead of the EU in the plastic bottling recycling innovation race with some of the most stringent recycling requirements globally.

The European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment (ENVI) has voted to bring more transparency to the European Union fishing industry. These proposals mark progress towards ensuring sustainability in seafood supply and marine ecosystems in the EU.

The natural foundations for human prosperity are being undermined at an alarming rate, yet according to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) the financial solutions currently on the table will be insufficient to halt or reverse the decline.

Strong growth in athleisure sales amidst a COVID-19 driven online acceleration has been a rare bright spot in a challenging operating environment for the apparel industry.
Yet the related increase in synthetic fibre use is likely to extend and deepen water-related risks to human and animal health.

Seafood, the most traded food globally, is operating with a broken supply chain. Bottlenecks are apparent at both processors and distributors. If the seafood market were working efficiently, harvesting output would have fallen more dramatically. To date, lower seafood prices have failed to stop this oversupply, which means that seafood waste is rising.

As natural capital related losses in agricultural production and trade materialise, Argentina’s debt-paying capacity will likely be compromised. Sovereign investors and the IMF are heavily incentivised to demand a clear and credible pathway to achieving zero deforestation, in turn, bolstering Argentina’s mid-term attractiveness for investment.

Deep inside the EU’s seven-year budget and recovery plan, which was approved on Friday 24 July, is a plastics’ waste levy of €800/tonne that comes into force in January 2021, despite the fact that insufficient recycling infrastructure exists throughout the EU.

China’s distant water fleets dependant on subsidy for profitability; SDG investors need to take note.

Alexandra Pinzon, Nick Robins and Gabriel Thoumi explore how investors in sovereign bonds can take

Last month, the EU Commmission launched two groundbreaking strategies – Farm-to-Fork and EU Biodiviersity –

Today, 5 June 2020, is not only the International Day for the Fight against Illegal,

South Africa’s economy is suffering from economic structural risks and natural capital degradation, pushing sectors

In these uncertain times, as supply chains are challenged by the twin risks of decreasing

The impact of COVID-19 on the global economy is just beginning to become clear. On

Selling by foreign portfolio investors decreased India’s foreign exchange reserves by $12 billion in March

The agribusiness sector, with over 5,600 different traded commodities[i] valued at more than $5 trillion

As of Thursday 26 March, and before the $2 trillion U.S. stimulus package and U.S.

Supporting the European Green Deal[i] in aide of carbon neutrality and as part of the

As we enter 2020, the EU is moving forward with four key overarching policy objectives,

Plastics in of themselves are not bad – plastics in many cases improve life quality.

In their infinite wisdom, because water mysteriously arrives each day in plastic bottles from supermarkets,

The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, ended last week and the verdict

Anyone can use a fire extinguisher; using one requires no special skills. Yet Australia’s fires

At the Food and Agriculture Organization’s annual Investment Days in December 2019, Planet Tracker, alongside

The annual get-together for policy makers, civil society and businesses to announce systems to mitigate

In November 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted to support rules that

Investors have recently added their voice to the chorus of concern about the fires in

This week at Responsible Investor North America, Mark Campanale, Co-Founder, Planet Tracker and Carbon Tracker,

Saudi Arabia’s anticipated Aramco initial public offering – valued at $1.5 trillion – is fully

Transparency was the key discussion point at last week’s Sustainable Seafood Symposium hosted by Seafood

On Monday 4 November, the U.S. government formally notified the United Nations that it would

On Sunday 27 October, Argentina elected left-leaning Alberto Fernández as its president, defeating former President