As part of the simplification of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation proposed by the European Commission last November (see EUROPE 13756/15), the influential ShareAction organisation is urging the EU’s co-legislators to tighten up the reform in order to prevent greenwashing and direct capital towards the green and social transitions. It welcomes the future official categorisation of financial products, which is intended to replace the classifications in Articles 8 and 9, which are considered confusing.
In a working document published on Thursday 5 February, the NGO calls for “stewardship” to be made a mandatory pillar of the regulatory framework, by reinstating transparency obligations for financial players and imposing commitment strategies for all sustainable products.
ShareAction is also calling for stricter criteria for classifying sustainable products - in particular by raising the minimum proportion of investments that are genuinely aligned with the European taxonomy (see EUROPE 13776/17), so that a product cannot be said to be “sustainable” if its exposure to ‘green’ activities is too limited - and for the exclusion of new projects linked to fossil fuels, in order to ensure the credibility of the reform.
See the working document: https://aeur.eu/f/kmp (Original version in French by Bernard Denuit)