In the autumn of 2020, a coalition of French and Brazilian Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) took legal action against the French-owned retail giant Groupe Casino, claiming the company had failed its ‘duty of vigilance’ by selling products linked to deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.

There is a growing call for financial markets to take sustainability into account when allocating capital. But how can we differentiate corporate sustainability leadership from greenwash? In this presentation, I’ll summarise four lessons we learned while advising a large financial investment fund.

Functional traits are phenotypic traits that affect an organism's performance and shape ecosystem-level processes. However, estimatingfunctionaldiversity(i.e. thesumoffunctionsinducedbythe diversity of functional traits) as ameasure of biodiversity remains difficult inpractice.