The co-chair of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) has confirmed the launch date for the final nature reporting recommendations as Sep. 18, speaking at a conference in London on Monday, stating that the highly-anticipated disclosure guidelines will be presented at the New York Climate Week.
Speaking during the Biodiversity and Nature Markets Summit 2023, organised by City & Financial Global, David Craig told the audience that the recommendations would be launched in the US city later in the year.
“We’ll be publishing our final recommendations to the New York Climate Week on September 18,” said the TNFD co-chair and former board member at financial industry body TheCityUK, urging any firms attending the financial sector event to sign up to become a member of the taskforce if they had not already.
At an event earlier in the month, Craig had suggested he was “confident” that the final nature reporting recommendations will remain similar to the draft, which was published in April, amid an ongoing final consultation on the text which is open until the start of June.
The cross-stakeholder body aims to steer businesses and financial organisations in calculating and reporting their dependencies and impacts on nature and the recommendations come in the wake of the historic agreement of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) at the UN’s COP15 biodiversity negotiations in Montreal last December.
He referred to the more-than 200 companies that are members of the taskforce and who are conducting pilots on reporting their nature impacts.
“Please do not wait for the next COP … start now,” he said, addressing the room of financial market participants.
Following the clear signal given to the sector by the GBF, with several points among the 23 targets outlined in the framework directly addressing private finance and one specifically looking at impact disclosure, it is now inevitable that nature disclosure and risk becomes a key factor in investment decision-making, the event heard.
“We’re going to see a shift in investment away from high-impact nature destructive activity … to more nature positive outcomes,” Craig said, adding that a new type of entity would emerge, which he coined as the “stranded unnatural asset”.
“We know it is coming.”
He added that it was now crucial that companies work out how to engage with civil society and figure out how to transition, and not just set targets which has so far been the predominant practice.
Target 15 of the GBF, agreed at COP15 in Montreal at the end of last year, saw governments encouraged to mandate large companies and financial institutions to regularly monitor, assess, and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies, and impacts on nature.
“[Companies] are learning what it takes to assess nature-related risks, but also learning that nature risk is both more immediate, more direct, and often larger than climate risk,” he said, referring to the interdependencies of solutions to solve the nature and climate crises.
By Roy Manuell – roy@carbon-pulse.com
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