Financing for Biodiverse Futures: Aligning Agribusiness and Financial Systems with Biodiversity and Indigenous Rights

Biodiversity loss poses significant yet underrecognized risks to investors and the financial system. Despite global consensus on the need to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, most financial institutions continue to underestimate nature-related risks in their assessments, overlooking how these risks compound and intensify climate-related impacts. At the same time, the crucial role of Indigenous Peoples in safeguarding biodiversity and climate stability is often ignored or undermined even though many of the world’s remaining biodiversity hotspots are located on Indigenous lands now under growing threat from industrial expansion and the financiers that support it.

A key arena where biodiversity, climate, and Indigenous rights intersect is global agribusiness, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies as a major driver of interconnected risks spanning food systems, water, health, and local economies. Yet investors remain largely unprepared for how biodiversity loss and climate change amplify one another, while current financial models that fail to account for cascading risks significantly understate vulnerabilities.

This session, part of Forest & Finance Coalition's broader day of side events at PRI in Person São Paulo 2025: Civil society perspectives on the challenges of investing in nature (register here) will examine how the expansion of global supply chains is fueling deforestation, ecosystem collapse, accelerating climate change, and human rights abuses against Indigenous Peoples drawing on Brazil’s Cerrado as a case study to reveal major gaps in investor risk assessment.

It will also explore solutions such as establishing No Go or exclusion zones in critical ecosystems and elevating Indigenous and local community voices in financial decision-making. The discussion will highlight the Position Statement on Financiers’ Responsibilities regarding Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and Biodiversity, led by the Banks & Biodiversity Initiative’s Indigenous Advisory Group, and Friends of the Earth US’s report “Financing for Biodiverse Futures? Key Considerations for Financial Institutions to Stop and Reverse Biodiversity Loss". Originally published in October 2024, the report has been updated to reflect revised bank policies on biodiversity and to analyze how these policies align with the Banks & Biodiversity Initiative’s eight proposed No Go areas.

Participants will gain practical insights into how banks and investors can strengthen biodiversity protection, respect Indigenous rights, and enhance portfolio resilience.

🎤 Panelists: 

• Ms. Eryn Schornick, Senior Consultant, Friends of the Earth US (moderator) 

• Mr. Sirito-Yana Aloema, Indigenous leader from the Galibi people of Suriname, Member of the Indigenous Advisory Group to the Banks & Biodiversity Initiative   

• Mr. Jeff Conant, Senior International Forests Program Manager, Friends of the Earth US

• Mr. Kamran Khan, Managing Director, Head of Sustainable Finance for Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa, Deutsche Bank Group  

• TBD: representative of an asset management firm

• TBD: UN / Brazil experts

REGISTER HERE for Forest & Finance Coalition's full day of side events (5 Nov) at PRI in Person São Paulo 2025: Civil society perspectives on the challenges of investing in nature