Over the past decade, ESG investment funds have become a wildly popular corner of finance. Money poured in even though there was little oversight to determine which funds could fairly claim that they focused on environmental factors, social issues or questions of corporate governance. Now there’s a vigorous shakeout. Around the world, regulators are writing — and revising — rules to govern these strategies. In Europe, that led some of the world’s biggest fund managers to strip the coveted top ESG tag from about €200 billion ($215 billion), or more than a third, of client funds from July 2022 through March this year. In the US, where the term is embroiled in partisan politics, the pool of assets carrying the ESG tag has, by one measure, shrunk by more than half over the past two years as definitions shifted. And questions around terminology remain unsettled, feeding accusations that ESG amounts to nothing more than “greenwashing.”
Source: ESG Rule Changes by EU, SEC and Others Set to Shake Up Sustainable Investing – Bloomberg
