Finance Report from UK Global Resource Initiative (GRI) published
The UK Government’s Global Resource Initiative Finance Report, written by Efeca on behalf of the GRI Taskforce, contains recommended actions for the UK Government to take to require financial institutions to assess, act and publicly disclose on the steps they are taking to avoid or mitigate the risks that their lending or investment activities are linked to deforestation or land conversion.
It is published on the gov.uk website alongside the original GRI Final Recommendations Report (March 2020).
Recognising and building on the work currently underway around nature and climate disclosure, the Report sets out an ambitious but pragmatic two-step approach to achieving this:
Step 1: Recommending as a first step that the Government introduce a legal requirement for the finance sector to apply the same principles of due diligence that will be asked of supply chain companies (under the current due diligence obligation within the Environment Act 2021), to ensure no investment or lending benefits from or supports illegal deforestation
Step 2: As a second step, raising the bar for both the finance and supply chain sectors to prohibit use, investment or lending in forest risk commodities that cannot be shown to have been produced legally and sustainably.
