French data company Iceberg Data Lab expects to double the number of clients using its products, including the Corporate Biodiversity Footprints (CBF), for a second time over the next year.
The Paris-based company first saw the client base across all of its products, of which CBF is the flagship, double throughout 2023, said Matthieu Maurin, CEO of Iceberg Data Lab.
“We’ve doubled our client base and we now have more than 50 large financial institutions using that solution,” Maurin told Carbon Pulse.
CBF measures the extent of a company’s impact on biodiversity in absolute and relative terms using the metric of mean species abundance. Iceberg Data Lab also offers other products spanning biodiversity, climate, and regulation.
CDC Biodiversite’s Global Biodiversity Score and CBF have emerged as leading nature impact assessment tools, though there are numerous other comparable initiatives.
Last year, half of French asset managers to report their biodiversity footprints, under national requirements, used Iceberg Data Lab’s CBF, Maurin said.
As nature reporting expectations ramp up around the world, such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), more companies outside France will use the CBF, Maurin predicted.
“We have a large client base outside France, we have a permanent establishment in the UK – the majority of our pipeline is there actually,” Maurin said.
Zander Dale, senior sustainability consultant at UK-based consultancy EcoAct, said he has seen a big uptick in the number of biodiversity footprinting enquiries during 2024, driven by CSRD.
“There is some still some confusion around ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘how’, and that’s why we focus on the education piece at the start,” Dale told Carbon Pulse.
In April, Iceberg Data Lab announced it closed a funding round of $10 million led by a venture capital firm, with additional investment from MAIF Avenir and AXA Investment Managers, bringing the total raised to over $15 mln.
The publication of the final recommendations from the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosure (TNFD) last September has spurred a push for nature disclosures around the world.
Iceberg Data Lab has already participated in TNFD pilots with French financial institutions Credit Agricole, BNP Paribas, Mirova, and Axa, while it has one in the pipeline with a large Asian financier that it could not name.
Asia, Japan, and the US also represent key areas for expansion of its client base. Most uptake will relate to companies in sectors with the most material impacts, or the most reputational risk, such as food, mining, chemical, textiles, and luxury goods, he said.
Food companies will see a particular focus on biodiversity impacts, Maurin said. “I believe that food transition to biodiversity will be what energy is to climate.”
Although little can stop the uptake in biodiversity footprinting, the rate of demand will depend on the outcomes of the COP16 biodiversity conference in Colombia in October, and the US election a month later, he said.
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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