Building on ESMA’s 2020 Strategy on Sustainable Finance, the Roadmap sets out ESMA’s deliverables on sustainable finance and how they will be implemented over the next three years. The Roadmap will serve as a practical tool to ensure that ESMA delivers on the wide array of sustainable finance tasks across several sectors in a coordinated way.
Verena Ross, Chair, said: “Advancing the sustainability agenda is crucial for ESMA, particularly as investor preferences shift to environmentally friendly financial products and the European Union strives to meet its commitments on tackling climate change. The Roadmap is a milestone for our sustainable finance work, identifying the priority work we will do to ensure that ESMA and national supervisors take ambitious action on priority sustainable finance issues. I am confident that ESMA’s actions will play a key role in contributing to the European Green Deal and in protecting European investors on this journey.”
ESMA defined three areas of focus on their website:
Tackling greenwashing and promoting transparency: the combination of growing demand for ESG investments and rapidly evolving markets creates room for greenwashing. Greenwashing is a complex and multifaceted issue which takes various forms, has different causes and has potential to detrimentally impact investors looking to make sustainable investments. Investigating this issue, defining its fundamental features and addressing it with coordinated action across multiple sectors, finding common solutions across the EU, will be key to safeguarding investors;
Building NCAs’ and ESMA’s capacities: the growing importance of sustainable finance requires NCAs and ESMA to further develop skills beyond their traditional areas of focus to understand and address the supervisory implications of new regulation and of novel market practices in this area. ESMA will help build its, and NCAs’, capacity on sustainable finance through a multi-year training programme and through facilitating the active sharing of supervisory experiences among NCAs. These efforts will also contribute to creating effective and consistent supervision in the area of sustainable finance;
Monitoring, assessing and analysing ESG markets and risks: the objective is to identify emerging trends, risks and vulnerabilities that can have a high impact on investor protection and on financial markets stability. ESMA will leverage on its data-analysis capabilities to support its, and NCAs’, supervisory work and to promote a convergent approach among NCAs. ESMA will undertake specific activities such as climate scenario analysis for investment funds, CCP stress testing and the establishment of common methodologies for climate-related risk analysis together with other public bodies.
| All opinions expressed are those of the author. investESG.eu is an independent and neutral platform dedicated to generating debate around ESG investing topics.
