Sustainability data and analytics provider GIST Impact has partnered with HUB Ocean, a Norway-based foundation advancing ocean science and data infrastructure, to provide investors with data and insights on ocean-related risks and impacts.
Despite the ocean’s critical role in regulating climate, supporting biodiversity, and sustaining industries, it has remained largely absent from investor datasets to date. The partners aim to create a new “nature layer” of data to map corporate asset locations and sector-specific pressures against robust ocean science. This will allow investors and companies to better understand their exposure to ocean-related risks and impacts that are set to rise as biodiversity protection expands.
The partners will focus on building datasets aligned with real financial use cases: screening, risk heat-mapping, stewardship and engagement, and reporting.
“Investors can’t manage what they can’t measure,” said Kimberly Mathisen, CEO of HUB Ocean. “This partnership provides the high-resolution data and scientific integrity needed to illuminate ocean-related risks and dependencies. By turning complex data into actionable insights, we will enable financial institutions to make better-informed decisions—for their portfolios and for the ocean.”
“The ocean has long been a biodiversity blind spot for investors due to the lack of usable data,” said Mahima Sukhdev, Chief Growth Officer at GIST Impact. “With HUB Ocean, we’re changing that by combining GIST Impact’s asset-level data and AI with HUB Ocean’s science-grade layers. We’re inviting investors and companies to test these models with us to ensure they work on real portfolios, not just in theory.”
The collaboration will initially focus on:
- Asset-level exposure analysis to identify corporate assets located in or near marine protected areas (MPAs) and other biodiversity hotspots.
- Sector-level pressure datasets, providing decision-useful indicators for high-impact industries such as shipping, offshore energy, coastal infrastructure, and aquaculture/fisheries.
- Forward-looking signals of company readiness, helping investors assess how firms are acknowledging and addressing ocean-related risks and dependencies.
The partnership will start with high-impact sectors where ocean interactions are most direct and measurable. But the scope will expand over time to indirectly-exposed industries, such as those affected by fish stock collapse (e.g. hospitality), and supply-chain dependencies (e.g. apparel).
GIST Impact and HUB Ocean will work with investors to test the new datasets with the aim of refining and co-creating tools that are scientifically robust, aligned with Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, and immediately actionable to support investment decision-making and reporting.
