Climate change poses new challenges for portfolio management. In our not-yet-low carbon world, investors face a trade-off between minimizing their exposure to climate risks and maximizing the benefits of portfolio diversification. This article investigates how investors and financial intermediaries navigate this trade-off. After the release of Morningstar’s novel carbon risk metrics in April 2018, mutual funds labeled as “low carbon” experienced a significant increase in investor demand, especially those with high risk-adjusted returns. Fund managers actively reduced their exposure to firms with high carbon risk scores, especially stocks with returns that correlated more with the funds’ portfolios and were thus less useful for diversification. These findings shed light on whether and how climate-related information can re-orient capital flows in a low carbon direction.

We survey portfolio companies of a large asset owner to explore the evolving landscape of nature risks. Nearly half of all companies (48 percent) view nature risks as financially material, and 43 percent of those perceive nature-related physical risks, and 27 percent transition risks, as having financial effects already today. Three-quarters of companies experiencing nature-related investor engagement view these interactions as value-generating. Nonetheless, according to the respondents, investor attention remains limited in key respects: while 40 percent report that investors consider nature risks, fewer than 25 percent believe investors assess how these risks affect cashflows or costs of capital. Half of the respondents believe investors will prioritize climate over nature; however, many think both topics are so intertwined that they cannot be separated. Our findings underscore the growing recognition of nature risks as financially relevant, while also pointing to challenges and opportunities for their integration into financial analysis and investor engagement.

This article introduces a new measure of a firm’s negative impact on biodiversity, the corporate biodiversity footprint (CBF), and studies whether it is priced in an international sample of stocks. On average, the CBF does not explain the cross-section of returns between 2019 and 2022. However, a biodiversity footprint premium (higher returns for firms with larger footprints) began emerging in October 2021 after the Kunming Declaration, which capped the first part of the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15). Consistent with this finding, stocks with large footprints lost value in the days after the Kunming Declaration. The launch of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) in June 2021 had a similar effect. These results indicate that investors have started to require a risk premium upon the prospect of, and uncertainty about, future regulation or litigation to preserve biodiversity.