Global financial services company Aviva has integrated Trase’s supply chain mapping data into its deforestation risk assessment approach as part of efforts to achieve commitments to eliminate agriculture commodity-driven deforestation in its portfolios by 2025.
In 2022, Aviva conducted its first deforestation risk assessment across its investment and underwriting activities. It drew on datasets which provide policy strength indicators on deforestation – including Global Canopy’s Forest 500 as well as CDP Forests and SPOTT – to identify companies with exposure to deforestation and rate their policies.
It found that more than a quarter of its corporate holdings by value were included in the combined datasets, half of which were financial institutions exposed to deforestation via the companies they finance, and the other half were companies exposed to deforestation via their supply chains.
Building on this approach, in 2023, Aviva integrated Trase data to provide information on deforestation exposure in commodity supply chains and to estimate deforestation impact associated with soft commodity producers and traders.
The aggregation of the three deforestation risk policy data providers, as well as Trase data, now sits within an internal tool to serve as a baseline for monitoring Aviva’s changing deforestation exposure and aid tracking progress of companies they are engaging with.