Nordea to donate further EUR 50,000 to the University of Jyväskylä for research with focus on biodiversity impact

“Alongside climate change, biodiversity loss represents the key challenge of our time. The aim of our latest donation is to continue supporting research that seeks solutions to biodiversity loss,” says Veronica Palmgren, who is responsible for the research collaboration at Nordea.

In 2025, the collaboration centered around defining the focus areas of the research and formulating the research questions that are relevant for the topic. As a result of this work, the commercial real estate sector was selected as the key focus area.

“The real estate sector is recognized for having adverse impacts on nature and biodiversity through land use, material flows and energy consumption related to buildings. While the role of a single property may be small, the weight of the real estate sector as a whole is significant – both in terms of societal sustainability and bank financing,” says Veronica Palmgren.

The key research questions focus on how the real estate sector impacts biodiversity the most and what causes these impacts. The significance of different impacts, such as land use, energy and material consumption, varies and the life cycle of a property has many stages, including potential changes in ownership and financing, that might drive impact.

“In this research programme, we try to establish a clear division of life cycle responsibilities related to the biodiversity footprint. We are also investigating what kind of insights and data are required to develop a model for assessing the biodiversity footprint of properties that can be applied to the entire financial sector and what the role of banks should be in the life cycle,” says Janne Kotiaho, Professor at the University of Jyväskylä and Chair of the Finnish Nature Panel.

The research collaboration will continue in 2026 by digging deeper into the questions that have now been defined. The aim is to create a general model for assessing the biodiversity footprint of the banking sector in the real estate sector. In addition, the research programme will further study the role of the biodiversity footprint as a tool in banks’ risk management toolbox.

“By supporting biodiversity-related footprint research, we strive to increase the understanding of nature related risks and impacts in the corporate and financial sector and in society at large. After concluding the programme, the research and its findings, including data, will be openly accessible to all stakeholders, thereby contributing to the societal sustainability transition in the Nordics,” says Veronica Palmgren from Nordea.

The University of Jyväskylä is one of Europe’s leading universities in the field of biodiversity research. Read more about the donation.

About the University of Jyväskylä Biodiversity Footprint Team

• World-class knowledge and experience of developing and assessing the biodiversity footprint of entities.
• Past and ongoing biodiversity footprint calculation experience of companies and other organisations, including Nokia, Finnish construction company SRV, retailer S Group, the cities of Tampere and Espoo and public procurement in Finland.
• Cooperation with other Nordic, European and global universities.