The global digital media monitoring firm’s white paper argues that the pressure is mounting for the financial industry to accelerate its transition towards more sustainable energy and business models.
Authored by VitalBriefing editor-in-chief Simon Gray, with insights from leading subject matter experts at the EIB, Luxembourg Stock Exchange and many others, the white paper titled ESG & Green Finance: What Next? aims to help readers understand key trends and help them plan their 2023 ESG strategies.
“It’s more urgent than ever to think about whether industry and regulatory initiatives for the financial sector are capable of helping the world achieve the Paris emission reduction goals,” said Simon Gray in a social media post regarding the white paper.
The report’s analysis draws on VitalBriefing’s 11-year history of monitoring and summarising financial and economic issues and details the increasingly important role played by sustainable finance for private and public financial sector clients, including giants such as the CSSF, the EIB and Banque International à Luxembourg.
Importantly, the report also looks at the detailed technical rules under the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation which will take effect in January 2023 and are already compelling many asset managers to downgrade funds previously classified as having a ‘sustainability purpose’.
While in Europe, climate change strategies mostly revolve around transparency requirements of investment and lending policies, in the United States ESG has turned into a political war between the left and right. Understanding and keeping an eye on how these dynamics evolve overseas will be important in the coming year.
The white paper also examines arguments over whether green investment offers a medium-to-long-term advantage in performance over non-sustainable products and the biggest problem facing financial firms with reporting obligations – the accessibility and reliability of the underlying company data they need.
Lastly, the 49-page report also considers the potential private investment has to protect biodiversity, a critical and often overlooked issue for long-term human prosperity. It concludes with an assessment of the state of play in the long-running and complex debate about how sustainable finance should treat fossil fuel emitters – excluding them from investment and lending portfolios, or engagement to help them down the path to the sustainability transition.
Stay tuned for a summary of the report by Silicon Luxembourg or download the white paper here.
