UNDP to issue guidance for investors on due diligence in conflict zones

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🗞️ Driving the news: UNDP is preparing guidance for investors on how to engage portfolio companies exposed to conflict-affected areas, Responsible Investor reported on 2 September 2026
• The initiative addresses a recognised gap: while due diligence expectations for operating companies have hardened, equivalent support for capital allocators has lagged
• UNDP has stated the guidance is intended for launch at the Annual UN Forum on Business and Human Rights

🔭 The context: UNDP published Heightened Human Rights Due Diligence for Business in Conflict-Affected Contexts: A Guide with the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights in 2022
• The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive cites that guide directly, recognising that conflict-affected or high-risk areas require enhanced due diligence
• Alongside the guidance, UNDP has described work with the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and Norwegian investors, including the Norwegian Pension Fund, KLP, Storebrand and Sparebank, to explore a data service for conflict-affected contexts, where reliable information is scarce

🌍 Why it matters for the planet: UNDP frames armed conflicts as environmental as well as humanitarian and political crises, and investor due diligence that maps conflict exposure necessarily touches the extractive and land-use operations where ecological damage and rights abuses tend to occur together
• Screening capital out of those settings, or conditioning it, is one of the few levers investors hold over environmental harm in territories where state enforcement has broken down

⏭️ What's next: Publication and the accompanying data service would need adoption by asset owners and managers to alter allocation
• Their interaction with CSDDD compliance will determine whether they become reference standards or remain advisory

💬 One quote: "The role of business is never neutral in contexts of fragility, during conflict, and during recovery" — Marcos Neto, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director of UNDP's Bureau for Policy and Programme Support (statement delivered in Oslo, 24 April 2025)

📈 One stat: 56 armed conflicts worldwide, the highest count since the Second World War, per UNDP as of April 2025.

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