Aligning Development Finance with Nature’s Needs: Protecting Nature’s Development Dividend” uses readily available data to estimate the dependency of development finance institutions’ (DFIs’) collective balance sheet on vulnerable nature (“dependency risk”), alongside the potential damage to nature from their lending activities (“nature at risk”).
We estimate aggregate balance sheet risk of over 450 DFIs by taking a representative sample of five
multilateral development banks (MDBs). For these five MDBs, we estimate “dependency risk” and “nature at risk” using publicly available information on their lending activities.
The results are then scaled upwards to reach the total valueof assets held by DFIs globally. It shows that any financial institution can and should make a credible, first-pass,
biodiversity-related stress-test of their balance sheet.
