Discover some important insights into concepts regarding the current issues linked to Green Finance.

Even if the IPCC reports are more and more alarming, scepticism is always present when it comes to climate change and the impact of human activity on it, as the Trump administration has proven in the past. Scepticism is also present when we talk about ESG criteria or Sustainable Finance. Around one-third of the finance professionals view Environmental, Social and Governance issues through the lens of negative screening without trying to understand the deeper context.

Globally, and similar to climate change, scepticism on Sustainable Finance is massively due to a lack of knowledge and a lack of clear and common definitions for its key concepts. How many people talk about Sustainable Finance without having a clear point of view on the issue?

Thanks to regulatory pressures and public opinion, Sustainable Finance is becoming THE new standard for financial centers across Europe. However, this lack of knowledge and not having a common basis are still present. Everybody knows what is an equity or a bond but few have a clear understanding of Green Bonds, Impact Investing or positive or negative screening… To fight against such scepticism, education, as usual, will be an essential tool to establish standards in Sustainable Finance.

Initiatives such as the EFPA ESG Advisor certification, which was launched in 2021 in 12 countries across Europe by the European Financial Planning Association (EFPA) can help to close the gap between the current level of information and the level necessary due to increasing regulatory requirements around the integration of ESG criterion. Always with this aim of a deeper understanding, EFPA Luxembourg publishes an update of its manual Green Ethica 2nd Edition. To achieve our goal, we enlarged this endeavour to a wider range of contributors from different backgrounds...