ZUKAI Inc. supported the biodiversity issue structure map that SBI Shinsei Bank created together with the Overseas Environmental Cooperation Center, Japan (OECC). The map appears, with a credit to ZUKAI Inc., in a paper the bank published in June 2026.
Background
Since fiscal 2025, SBI Shinsei Bank has been studying a way to advance sustainable finance by understanding the structure of environmental and social issues and identifying leverage points, the points of intervention where a small effort can produce a large change. The issue structure map was developed as a practical tool for that purpose.
The first theme is biodiversity. The aim is to organize and visualize the issues and activities closely linked to business, so that the map can be consulted when judging which issues a financing deal or a business contributes to.
What was made
The maps are made for each ecosystem domain. The first domains were forests, farmland and cities, the terrestrial ecosystems for which the most information is available. The paper shows the map for the farmland ecosystem.
The map places "loss of biodiversity" as the final issue and connects the elements that affect it, and the human activities behind them, with boxes and arrows. It follows these rules.
- Causal links with high confidence are drawn as solid arrows, and those with low confidence as dotted arrows
- The importance of each element or factor is shown by the height of its box
- Elements are reduced so that the map can be read on one sheet, and the omitted factors and causal links are covered in a separate text document
Looking at the boxes where many arrows converge shows which factors have a strong influence on the issue as a whole.
- SBI Shinsei Bank's approach to sustainable finance (SBI Shinsei Bank, in Japanese)
- Strengthening the issue-driven approach in sustainable finance: the issue structure map as a practical tool (PDF, in Japanese)
How it was done
According to the paper, the map was made in the following order.
- Identify the final issue
- Collect primary information published by international organizations, government agencies and others
- Organize the characteristics of the target ecosystem
- Trace back from the final issue and extract the important influencing elements
- Among them, identify the factors of human activity, centered on business activity
- Place the elements as boxes and connect them with arrows
The research and analysis were carried out by OECC, which has specialists in biodiversity, and ZUKAI Inc. supported the design and production of the map as a diagram. The paper notes that how fine the elements should be, and how far they should be covered, were points of discussion during the work.
ZUKAI Inc. also introduces a way to put the connections between social issues on a single sheet in its issue map.
Overview
- Period: created in October 2025, published in the paper in June 2026
- ZUKAI Inc.'s role: support for creating the issue structure map (design and production as a diagram)
- Deliverable: biodiversity issue structure maps (forest, farmland and urban ecosystems)
- Published in: SBI Shinsei Bank, "Strengthening the issue-driven approach in sustainable finance" (June 2026, in Japanese)
- Credit: (C) SBI Shinsei Bank (created by OECC in October 2025, with support from ZUKAI Inc.)