The Investor Participant Voices series highlights the expertise and experiences of Nature Action 100 Investor Participants.
Robeco and East Capital Group are Nature Action 100 Investor Participants engaging Alibaba, a multinational technology company headquartered in China, on nature action.
Below, Laura Bosch Ferreté, Senior Engagement Specialist at Robeco and Karine Hirn, Partner and Chief Sustainability Officer at East Capital Group share some experiences from their engagement with Alibaba including reflections on a capacity-building session that they led for hundreds of the company’s employees.
What are your reflections on engaging Alibaba under Nature Action 100?
Alibaba is a global leader in digital commerce, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, with extensive operations and market influence. In terms of risk materiality, Alibaba’s nature-related risks and impacts include sourcing of packaging, the management of post-consumer waste in its e-commerce business and water and energy usage associated with its cloud storage operations.
In response to conversations with the Nature Action 100 Investor Participants, Alibaba has demonstrated openness to investor engagement on nature-related issues.
A key milestone in our engagement with Alibaba was the opportunity to host a capacity-building session during the company’s internal Capital Market ESG Webinar earlier this year. Hundreds of Alibaba employees attended a dedicated session led by Robeco with support from East Capital Group that shared insights on the Nature Action 100 initiative, why nature-related risks and opportunities matter for the company’s business, and how these factors can be integrated into investment decision-making. The session replay has been made available to all employees on the company’s intranet for use as a long-term resource.
How have you been able to leverage the Nature Action 100 Company Benchmark to inform your engagement with Alibaba?
A major focus of our Nature Action 100 engagement team has been to support Alibaba in advancing from environmental awareness to setting measurable commitments. The results of the first Nature Action 100 Company Benchmark showed that Alibaba had significant opportunity to improve its action on the benchmark’s Ambition indicator by publishing a commitment to avoid and reduce its key drivers of nature loss and to restore and regenerate ecosystems throughout its value chain.
During the webinar session, we shared the company’s latest benchmark assessment with employees and contextualized the assessment against industry peers. Using the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosure’s LEAP framework, material issues were identified across Alibaba’s operations and value chain such as water usage, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. We also provided suggestions for improvements. The session sparked active dialogue, with company participants asking thoughtful questions about prioritizing business units for impact assessments and identifying tangible opportunities for nature-positive action.
Do you have any insights on challenges when engaging on nature? If so, how did you overcome them?
It is necessary to invest time in relationship building so that the company is able to see the investor engagement team as a productive partner which can support its sustainability agenda. Additionally, the complexity of nature-related topics can be intimidating and can jeopardize a company’s willingness to discuss how it approaches action. To address this, it is essential to deconstruct the broader concept into specific, tangible elements—such as the different drivers of biodiversity loss—and engage on each individually. This approach with Alibaba helped foster a more focused and productive dialogue.
All in all, this engagement has been extremely positive. This interactive exchange helped build internal capacity and momentum, along with supporting Alibaba’s evolving nature strategy. We plan to continue engagement with the company to further support their progress.
What are your recommendations for other investors interested in supporting corporate capacity-building efforts?
It’s important to have a clear understanding of the company’s strategic priorities and align engagement dialogues accordingly. This is essential to advancing objectives as an investor engagement team. Positioning ourselves as a supportive resource and exploring opportunities to assist the sustainability team in raising internal awareness on nature-related issues has proven effective in this engagement dialogue. During the capacity building session, it was valuable to acknowledge the company’s existing efforts, benchmark them against peers, and identify areas where it can demonstrate leadership within its sector. This approach fostered a constructive dialogue and encouraged continuous improvement.
Laura Bosch Ferreté is a Senior Engagement Specialist at Robeco, where she leads the firm’s stewardship strategy on biodiversity. She brings deep expertise in engaging with publicly listed companies and sovereigns on deforestation and broader nature-related risks and opportunities. Since joining Robeco in 2016, she has held various roles within the Sustainable Investing Center of Expertise in both the Netherlands and Singapore, where she supported institutional investors across Asia Pacific in integrating sustainability into their investment strategies.
Prior to joining Robeco, she gained experience in corporate sustainability research working at the United Nations University and non-profit organizations in Latin America.
She holds a Master’s in Public Policy from United Nations University and a Bachelor’s in Economics from University of Barcelona.
Karine Hirn is a partner, co-founder and the Chief Sustainability Officer of East Capital Group, as well as the Chairperson of the Luxembourg-domiciled management company and fund structures of East Capital Group. Previously, Karine was Chief Representative in China, based in Shanghai and served as CEO of East Capital in Sweden prior to moving to China in 2010.
Born in France and based in Hong Kong since 2013, Karine is a French Trade Advisor and an honorary member of the Swedish Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. She also serves as independent non-executive director (INED) at Lion Finance Group (BGEO.L) and as an advisor to the Center for Emerging Markets at Northeastern University in Boston. Before East Capital, she worked in Russia, in the banking industry and as a financial consultant in Nizhny-Novgorod and Moscow.
Karine holds an MSc in Management from EM Lyon, a Post Graduate Degree in Eastern European Studies from Sciences Po Paris. She also studied at the Moscow Academy of Finance and the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki. She speaks French, English, Swedish, Russian and is conversational in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.