The WWF-SIGHT team have published a white paper with the World Bank on ‘Spatial Finance’. A new geospatial driven approach with the potential to help financial markets differentiate commercial actors more accurately on their climate and environmental performance to aid realignment towards truly sustainable development

In this report, we outline a possible taxonomy and hierarchy for spatial finance, showing how discrete forms of technology, approaches and data can be considered within a single consistent framework.

We identify three major data barriers in the mainstreaming of spatial finance:

• lack of reliable asset level data at required granularity and regularity,
• lack of supply chain data at required granularity,
• poor adaptation of observational climate and environmental data in financial applications.

We suggest that there should be a strong dialogue between climate and environmental data experts and the financial sector to determine needs and iteratively develop data solutions.

We argue that environmental non-profit players, as primary holders of climate and environmental data, have a responsibility to engage in this space to ensure the best data is available and is applied correctly to provide robust spatial finance insights. Finally, we argue that such a holistic climate and environmental data portfolio should become a global public good.

Link to report here

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