Nature-related financial risks: The next risk frontier in Asia-Pacific

FOLLOWING this year’s United Nations climate conference, world leaders are paying increasing attention to another environmental topic: nature loss and its impact on our economies. Science is showing us how climate change and nature loss are highly connected. Climate change and nature loss create a vicious circle, where one intensifies the other. Solve both, or neither, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has declared.

As humans, we rely on nature for many things from food and water, to regulating climate and diseases, providing us opportunities for recreation to enhance our well-being, and many more. Through our economic activities, humanity has caused the loss of 83 per cent of all wild mammals and half of all plants. The current rate of extinction is tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years – and it is accelerating.

At the epicentre of the global nature crisis is the Asia-Pacific region, home to nearly half of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.