The goal of NatureFinance, which was established in 2019 as The Finance for Biodiversity Initiative, is to further incorporate biodiversity issues into financial decision-making procedures, according to ESG Today. As a result, initiatives to conserve and restore nature are more aligned with global finance. NatureFinance is renowned for its dedication to using creative financial solutions to address sustainability and environmental issues.

The urgent need to address the sluggish progress in environmental protection and the misallocation of funding in terms of environmental effect is what gave rise to NatureAlign. In order to encourage more sustainable economic activity, NatureAlign is made to assist financial organizations, including banks and asset managers, in evaluating and enhancing their environmental initiatives.

Increasing the materiality of biodiversity in financial decision-making is the aim of NatureFinance. To enable portfolio-level analysis and action, their new tool, NatureAlign, combines a special collection of information, such as biodiversity and water shortage measures.

NatureAlign works by enabling organizations to enter information about their loans and investments onto a watchlist. In order to give thorough evaluations, including maps and statistics that describe the status of nature and water hazards related to their portfolios, the application then makes use of third-party biophysical, geographical, and financial data.

Beyond preliminary evaluations, NatureAlign provides linkages to important sustainability frameworks such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Disclosures (TNFD) LEAP framework and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Based on the results of the study, this integration enables focused activities and assists users in identifying possible areas to start reducing environmental effect.

The creation of more modules that might offer instruments or frameworks for deeper alignment with global biodiversity frameworks, organized suggestions for establishing nature-related goals, and chances for businesses to assess the environmental effects of changing their investments are all potential future developments for NatureAlign.

"With our financial and economic system currently on track for 2-3C warming, financial institutions, like asset managers, asset owners, and banks, are crucial to redirecting finance towards economic activities that deliver nature-positive outcomes," said Julie McCarthy, CEO of NatureFinance, underscoring the vital role of financial institutions. By actively managing nature risks and looking for nature-positive possibilities in their decision-making, financial institutions may significantly alter the business and environmental landscapes. In a world that is changing quickly, they need access to innovative, easily available tools and data to assist them decide where, how, and what to invest in. To link international investment with an economy that benefits people, the environment, and the climate, financial institutions must take the lead immediately.

"Our goal with NatureAlign is to create a tool that is useful and accessible in order to drive progress in their nature journey and better track their impact on nature," said Sarah Krisht, NatureFinance's environmental Risk Lead. Since user demands are at the heart of NatureAlign, we worked with more than fifteen financial institutions to build it, and we want to keep doing so iteratively.