The Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), the European Sustainable Investment Forum (Eurosif), and the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), have issued a collective statement urging the European Commission to ‘preserve the integrity and ambition of the EU’s sustainable finance framework’.
The groups teamed up with 162 investors managing approximately €6.6 trillion in assets, along with 49 supporting organisations, in issuing the statement, amid current discussions on omnibus legislation to amend key regulations.
‘Fundamental cornerstones’
The statement notes that the EU Taxonomy, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) are ‘fundamental cornerstones’ of the EU’s sustainability policy, helping investors to manage risks, identify market opportunities, and direct capital toward a net-zero economy.
‘Businesses and financial market participants need long-term policy stability to support their implementation efforts. Recent studies, including those published by the EU’s own Platform for Sustainable Finance, are showing that increased transparency created by these regulations is starting to have an impact,’ the statement reads.
‘We must not lose sight of the outcomes these regulations are set to support: accelerating investment towards a more competitive and sustainable economy and enabling investors and other market participants to better manage the risks, impacts and opportunities by facilitating access to high-quality, comparable and reliable sustainability data.’
Private capital
The investors also cite the need for private capital to help bridge an annual investment gap of €750 billion to €800 billion, as identified in the Draghi report, in order to ensure both long-term economic resilience and competitiveness.
‘Timely access to high-quality and comparable reporting is a prerequisite to inform and guide their investment decisions: investors are the key users of sustainability disclosures,’ they add.
The statement also acknowledges the importance of streamlining and improving the coherence of the EU’s sustainable finance framework, adding that such efforts would reduce reporting burdens and complexity.
Reopening these frameworks, however, would create regulatory uncertainty and could ‘ultimately jeopardise the Commission’s goal to reorient capital’ in support of the European Green Deal, they claim. Read the full statement here and below.
