Rabobank publishes its global nature vision and approach
Everyone on the planet is affected by climate change and nature loss. Rabobank clearly recognizes the gravity of the situation and acknowledges that the global cost of inaction is higher than the costs to increase nature restoration. As a bank we can contribute by scaling up our financing of natural infrastructure and developing more sustainable customer solutions. This asks for a nature vision and approach. That’s what is now bundled in one document: ‘Value nature – Back to planetary boundaries’, outlining the steps we have taken and are planning to take.
As an international food and agriculture business bank, we know how much impact our global food system has on our planet as well as that many of our customers are (highly) dependent on nature. In fact, our analysis shows that approximately 85% of our covered assets is ‘highly’ to ‘very highly’ dependent on one or more ecosystem services. Therefore we have been looking for ways to enable farmers to increase their positive impact and decrease the negative impact on nature. For instance with the Biodiversity Monitor for both dairy as well as arable farming, the Open Soil Index and AGRI3 Fund.
Overview of vision and approach
This document provides an overview of where we are with our nature approach and where we’re heading. Ultimately we want to help our customers to bring their impacts ‘back to planetary boundaries’ and to integrate nature in our way of working in the bank. This means that we support customers in their sustainable transition and that we aim to progressively adapt our portfolio and policies toward alignment with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Based on analyses of double materiality we currently will focus our nature efforts on three ‘topics’: (1) land use, (2) water and (3) pollution, being aware that these topics are highly interdependent and connected and require an integral approach.
Our main priorities, stemming from the Global Biodiversity Framework, are:
Collaboration
We are aware that we still have a long journey ahead and that we don’t have all the answers yet. We can't do this alone and that’s why we, as a cooperative bank, engage with our clients and collaborate with many external partners to jointly learn, for instance in the context of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), Finance for Biodiversity Pledge or with organizations such as WWF.
*Please note that the text in the shared document is leading and this text is derived from that.