Blind spots in biodiversity finance: evaluating data providers and asset manager practices

There is an increasing need in the financial sector to address biodiversity loss. The awareness about biodiversity issues can be observed among regulators, investors, data providers, and stakeholders (Flammer et al., 2025). However, biodiversity integration still remains at the early stages as biodiversity data and policies are still fragmented and heterogeneous (Karolyi et al., 2023). This thesis is structured to address the gap in biodiversity practices, presenting both practical and academic perspectives. The first part of the paper presents the author’s internship experience in the ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) team at Axiom Alternative Investments, a Paris-based asset manager, where the majority of the work focused on biodiversity policies. This experience illustrates how biodiversity is implemented at the asset manager level and highlights potential constraints in biodiversity exclusion policies. The second part is an academic analysis of biodiversity data provision in the financial world. It examines biodiversity integration at both the asset manager and data provider levels, assessing how asset managers incorporate biodiversity into their investment decisions and identifying potential data gaps and biases from data providers. This section presents the central research question, as outlined in Section 2.1. Introduction and Literature review section, which is addressed through the methodology and discussion Thus, the aim of this work is to observe the limitations in current biodiversity integration in the financial world and to provide possible recommendations to bridge the gap between financial practices and natural science.