Our Impact range continues to grow: with four strategies and a multi-skilled team of eleven spread across different countries, it is now a substantial operation. In addition to Positive Impact Equity and Positive Impact Emerging Equity, which were joined by Biodiversity Restoration in 2021, the latest strategy launch, in 2022, was Global Impact Equity.
Concerns over the future of our planet have been gradually extending beyond the climate change issue to encompass ecosystem and biodiversity preservation and this trend really took off in 2022. Fittingly, this is the first year we have reported on our Biodiversity Restoration strategy, as we approach its second anniversary. A dedicated Biodiversity Committee ensures a multi-stakeholder approach to the topic. In that context, we have joined the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) Forum, the leading global initiative working to develop and deliver a risk-management and disclosure framework for nature-related risks.
We’ve focused our goals for 2023 on investor engagement, specifically how we can more clearly evidence its beneficial effect on the companies we hold in our portfolios, as we believe our role should be to partner with our investee companies and other stakeholders to help create systems change. The Biodiversity Restoration strategy is where we have placed an especially significant emphasis on engagement, not least because the understanding and reporting on biodiversity is still in the very early stages.
Our Biodiversity Committee drives this work and, in 2022, hosted our first multi-stakeholder workshop. This conversation tackled a sector which is central to creating meaningful change for biodiversity and nature – food. We posed the question “How can companies in the food value chain alter their operations to protect and restore biodiversity without compromising the food requirements of humans?” and we were joined by several companies along the food value chain, NGOs and academics from the University of Cambridge.
Biodiversity means healthy ecosystems, and at UBP we regard our organisation as an ecosystem too. Every colleague is important to a given process, which in turn has an influence on our larger-scale operations. And we know that the more diversity we have within that ecosystem, within our workforce – the greater the combination of different backgrounds, skills and approaches – the more productive, creative and successful we will be.
The development of our impact investing offering is a perfect example of a healthy and diverse ecosystem, drawing on UBP’s special mix of adaptability, vision and ambition to create a balanced and multifaceted set of products and services. In fact, we regard the impact franchise as the mother tree of our sustainable investments. Supported by the arrival of our Global Head of Sustainability, and by the Bank’s will to develop a comprehensive sustainable thematic offering, the five years of groundwork undertaken by the Impact team has laid solid foundations for our overall sustainability approach.
This year’s edition of the Impact Report, with its comprehensive selection of data, case studies and projections for the future, aims to reflect the vision of our team and convey their joint efforts to deliver the highest-quality impact investments to our clients.