Sustainability
Tenured Harvard Business School professor, now at Oxford University.
Today the comment period closes for the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) consultation paper (CP) “CP22/20: Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) and investment labels.” The October 25, 2022 press release announcing this consultation stated that “We are proposing to introduce a package of measures aimed at clamping down on greenwashing. This includes sustainable investment labels, disclosure requirements and restrictions on the use of sustainability-related terms in product naming and marketing.” The final rules will be issued in the first half of this year.
I was pretty busy last fall keeping up with all of the exciting anti-ESG/anti-Woke initiatives by various Republican politicians and affiliated groups. It was only over the holidays that I had the time to read the FCA’s CP about how it proposes to deal with fund greenwashing. This is a very real problem where the FCA has already done some good work and I’ve written about this with the famous DWS whistleblower Desiree Fixler. Excessive claims about the performance and benefits of ESG funds and poor transparency regarding their portfolio construction by Sustainability Opportunists have provided great sustenance to the voracious maws of the always-hungry Sustainability Taliban and Sustainability Flat-Earthers.
Robert G. Eccles of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford is the author of a number of books on integrated reporting, sustainability and the role of business in society. His focus is on sustainability from both a company and investor perspective. Professor Eccles is also involved in a variety of initiatives to embed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues in real world decision making. One of these is the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), of which he was the founding chairman. In 2018, Professor Eccles was selected by Barron’s as one of the top 20 influencers on ESG investing.
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