Global Food Forum: Climate changes fund attitudes

Climate change is already having a major impact on the attitudes of global fund managers and private equity groups.

Fiona Simson, President, National Farmers Federation. Picture: Hollie Adams

Climate change is already having a major impact on the attitudes of global fund managers and private equity groups towards investing in Australian agriculture, according to one of Australia’s largest cattle companies.

Stephen Moore, commercial general manager of the North Australian Pastoral Company (NAPCo) said climate change was now being spoken of frankly within the beef industry, with its impact on investment risk assessment a clear reality.

Mr Moore said NAPCo, which is owned by the Queensland Investment Corporation and runs more than 200,000 cattle on 13 outback cattle stations across Australia’s north, is responding through increased transparency, greater measuring and reporting of sustainability “metrics”, and on-farm actions to improve carbon sequestration in soil and vegetation.

At the same time, beef consumers in Australia and internationally are increasingly demanding guarantees that their beef has been produced sustainably.

“We’ve got a sustainability framework now set up to report data around what we’re doing in these areas, and that’s really important because, from our point of view, we see it from both a customer standpoint and also because we are owned by an institutional investor in QIC,” Mr Moore told the Global Food Forum in Sydney yesterday.

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“There is absolutely no doubt that climate change is having an impact on institutional investment in agriculture; it’s being talked about more. That whole impact and ethical investing landscape is very real.”

Mr Moore said concerns about global climate change and its impact on the beef supply chain were coming from three directions: customers demanding sustainability, investors concerned about potential risk exposure and cattle station owners who want to ensure peak productivity and profitability.

“But it is a challenge because while the Australian beef industry has a beef sustainability framework — and has committed to being carbon neutral by 2030 — we then have to create methodologies for farmers and producers, whether big or small, to be able to go out on their land and make a difference and report on some of these environmental management metrics whether it is around tree and grass cover, soil carbon, animal feed animal, welfare, transport, animal husbandry,” he said.