Federated Hermes

With the joint ambition of raising awareness and promoting the protection of biodiversity, global investment firm Federated Hermes has launched a Biodiversity Equity Fund using insights from the Natural History Museum's Biodiversity Trends Explorer.

The new fund meets a demand in the sector for financial solutions that support the global goals on biodiversity. It will be investing in a concentrated portfolio of companies that are helping to preserve and restore biodiversity.

The Natural History Museum has developed the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) - a scientifically rigorous metric that estimates the loss of biodiversity across an area. The index uses a combination of land use, ecosystem, species and population data to give a simple figure for 'intactness' - the percentage of an area's natural ecological community that persists.

Last year, the Museum made the BII data accessible through its online tool the Biodiversity Trends Explorer. The tool enables users to compare the state of local ecosystem biodiversity in different countries and to explore how different possible economic futures will affect nature in the coming decades. The Federated Hermes team are making use of this data to help to support and inform investment decisions.

Together with Federated Hermes, the Museum will continue to explore how the its biodiversity experts and data scientists can help to positively inform the products and services that investment companies enable. Federated Hermes will donate 5% of the net management fee revenue from this fund to the Museum.