Our impact investing franchise saw further substantial development in 2021: not only did we further refine our approach, but we launched the third strategy in our Impact range, which has biodiversity as its theme.
Our Impact team focuses on natural capital and its two main components of climate and biodiversity, which form the foundations for change across all our Impact themes, whether social or environmental. The climate has always been a core concern at UBP: our franchise continued to outperform benchmark indices across a range of climate indicators in 2021, we signed up to various climate-related initiatives and commitments, and we continued to make our own operations more sustainable by cutting energy consumption and emissions. But we are also leading the way on biodiversity: we launched our Biodiversity Restoration strategy in September 2021 and established a Biodiversity Committee through which we engage with multiple stakeholders. These developments also illustrate another of UBP’s distinguishing features, i.e. the emphasis we place on engagement. This takes place both multilaterally – e.g. with a variety of NGOs through the aforementioned climate initiatives and Biodiversity Committee – and at the bilateral level by interacting with the companies in which we invest. Engagement has always been important for UBP, as the case studies in the full report show, and we will increase our efforts further in this area.
We are going through turbulent times, but UBP’s Impact strategy continues to focus on long-term solutions. For instance, clean mobility and decarbonisation are ways to tackle issues relating to energy prices and security, and so the Impact approach is highly relevant to dealing with problems that are currently at the forefront of everyone’s minds.
