Art of detecting ‘greenwashing’

There are vast inconsistencies between the stated climate objectives of money managers and “the reality of their investments”.

While perhaps an unsurprising statement given all the reporting on Wall Street greenwashing, this conclusion by Paris-based business school EDHEC is tied to a more nuanced assessment of strategies behind climate-focused funds.

While asset managers talk at length about the use of climate data to construct their environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) portfolios, many funds are not run “in a manner that is consistent with promoting such an impact”, EDHEC academics wrote in a 65-page report that was titled “Doing good or feeling good? Detecting greenwashing in climate investing”.

The findings add to a growing body of research questioning the climate and ESG-related credentials of this burgeoning corner of the asset management industry. Regulators in the US and Germany have started separate investigations into potentially misleading investment products touting their ESG bona fides.

With supercharged hurricanes, floods and unprecedented wildfires sweeping the globe, it is well past time for asset managers to start doing the right thing, says Felix Goltz, a member of the EDHEC-Scientific Beta research chair that compiled the study. But when one digs into how most of the largest climate funds are truly invested, one finds few differences relative to market benchmarks like the Standard & Poor’s 500, he says.

“Even though investors and managers communicate extensively about the use of climate data to construct their portfolios, these data points represent at most 12% of the determinants of portfolio stock weights on average,” Goltz says.

Looked at another way, this means that 88% of what guides a climate fund is what you would find behind any other non-green investment.

Questions about exaggerated claims abound, since the vast majority of funds claiming adherence to net-zero investment strategies are subject to “large and obvious greenwashing risks”, Goltz says.

One of those risks is the temptation to game the system so as to earn better scores rather than truly make a difference. Money managers, along with regulators, should reassess the investment standards and practices in the area of climate alignment, Goltz says.

Funds need to go beyond displaying the “green scores” of their portfolios and instead invest in stocks “in a way that provides incentives for companies to act on climate change”.

To promote true alignment with climate objectives, rather than avoiding utilities altogether as a way of enhancing a green score, fund managers should put pressure on those industries to invest in technologies that can drastically reduce greenhouse gases, he says. This requires “highly selective, intra-sector capital allocation that favours climate change leaders”.