The Danish pension fund for academics, P+, has announced the launch of its ‘comprehensive plan’ for biodiversity as it looks to increase its focus on biodiversity in its active ownership activities.

As part of its plan, P+ has joined two new international investor collaborations relating to biodiversity: Spring, led by the Principles for Responsible Investment, and Nature Action 100.

Nature Action 100 aims to exercise active ownership with the 100 companies that have the greatest dependence or impact on nature and biodiversity to get them to deal with negative impacts and contribute to reversing the loss of biodiversity.

Meanwhile, the goal of Spring is to exercise active ownership with a particular focus on issues within deforestation and land degradation.

"P+ has for several years been in dialogue with selected companies within, among other things, pharmacy, food and consumer goods about their impact on and dependence on biodiversity,” said P+ investment director, Jasper Riis.

“Now we are accelerating further under our active ownership through Nature Action 100 and Spring, and we are already in dialogue with over 180 companies via our business partners.”

As part of the plan, P+ will now start classing biodiversity as an independent reason for divesting from companies.

While P+ had previously opted out of companies with a negative impact on biodiversity, the reason was always under the broader term ‘environment’.

The pension fund has temporarily de-selected seven companies due to their negative impact on biodiversity.

"As a starting point, we prioritise exercising active ownership in order to influence the companies we invest in in a positive direction,” Riis stated.

“If the dialogue is hopeless, we can, however, choose companies from. As part of the comprehensive plan, we have decided to make biodiversity an independent opt-out reason.

“In this way, we want to make it visible that a significant negative impact on biodiversity with no prospect of improvement in itself is enough to be put on our opt-out list.

"We are still in the early stages of finding methods that enable us to measure biodiversity systematically, and today it is a challenge to get valid data on biodiversity.

“However, the lack of data must not become an excuse for not acting. With the comprehensive plan, we are therefore now taking an important step in relation to addressing the loss of biodiversity as an investor, and we expect that in the future we will expand our measures for biodiversity further as we get better data to navigate from.”

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