GIST Impact, a leading provider of science-based sustainability data and analytics, has partnered with Global Canopy, a data-driven non-profit organisation focused on transforming market systems to halt nature loss. The collaboration aims to enhance investors’ and banks’ ability to incorporate deforestation risk into financial decision-making.
The partnership is designed to provide financial institutions with deeper insight into deforestation-related risks by combining Global Canopy’s key datasets—Forest IQ and Forest 500—with GIST Impact’s analytics platform. This integration enables users to make more informed decisions and steer capital toward environmentally responsible outcomes.
GIST Impact offers a data and analytics platform that helps investors assess the environmental and societal impact of business activities. Its technology supports the integration of climate, nature, and biodiversity data into portfolio risk analysis and decision-making. Global Canopy, on the other hand, specialises in identifying and disrupting market forces contributing to deforestation, using tools like Forest IQ and Forest 500 to hold companies and financial institutions accountable for their environmental impact.
The Forest IQ dataset provides detailed assessments of how 2,400 major companies manage deforestation risk. It evaluates exposure to deforestation through commodity supply chains, materiality of these risks, and company performance on mitigation efforts. Complementing this, the Forest 500 dataset ranks the most influential 500 companies and 150 financial institutions in the deforestation space based on their policies and performance.
By embedding these datasets into GIST Impact’s platform, financial institutions will be able to identify deforestation exposure in portfolios, evaluate the financial materiality of associated risks, and gauge the strength of corporate governance in addressing these issues. The goal is to normalise deforestation risk analysis across the financial sector and promote stronger ESG outcomes.
Looking ahead, GIST Impact will also support the expansion of Forest IQ to include more global companies, and provide technological assistance to help Global Canopy broaden the dataset’s reach. This collaboration complements existing climate-related data sources such as ENCORE, offering a holistic view of environmental risk.
GIST Impact CEO Pavan Sukhdev said, “Deforestation has always been a blow to the GDP of the poor, a livelihood loss and a loss of biodiversity. However, it has now also become a material financial risk that investors must account for. By integrating Global Canopy’s Forest IQ and Forest 500 datasets into our platform, we’re giving investors the tools to quantify, compare, and act on deforestation-related risks with confidence and clarity. This partnership brings rigour, scale, and science to an area of ESG that has too often lacked transparency.”
Global Canopy executive director Niki Mardas said, “This partnership will amplify the reach of Global Canopy’s deforestation data and allow organisations to measure and quantify their impact on nature and society. Protecting forests is central to nature and biodiversity targets and crucial to safeguard future business risk.”
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