Varma, one of Finland’s three largest pensions institutions, said a new survey of portfolio companies’ attitudes towards biodiversity loss has revealed what it sees as a surprising lack of concrete action plans.

The €63bn mutual pension insurance company said today that its survey of 318 companies operating in high-risk sectors showed only 39% had set targets for taking biodiversity into account in their operations, while just 43% had expressed their intention to take action to take biodiversity into account or compensate for it.

It said the survey of publicly available information showed only 9% of the companies had a concrete action plan to fulfil their commitment.

Hanna Kaskela, senior vice president of sustainability at Varma, said: “Considering how much information is available on biodiversity loss, it is a miracle that so many companies lacked a concrete action plan to take biodiversity into account.”

In Varma’s survey, which included listed equity investments and exchange-traded equity funds, 18% of companies had not taken biodiversity-related issues into account at all in their public policies.

“A key finding in the study was that taking biodiversity loss into account requires much more practical measures from companies,” Kaskela said.

“Biodiversity loss poses significant risks to companies’ operations, and the related regulation will have a strong impact on companies,” she said, adding that this would change the operating conditions.

The survey looked at a number of industrial sectors which it defined as high-risk in relation to biodiversity loss, including electricity and heat production, oil and gas, forestry, automotive, building materials, food and chemicals – as well as agricultural, pharmaceutical and personal product industries, textile and luxury goods industries, and waste management companies.

Varma said its study showed European companies to be ahead of peers in North America and Asia when it came to setting targets around biodiversity, although Japan was an exception, it said, with half of Japanese firms examined having set targets for preventing biodiversity loss.

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