1 Amendments of Miguel VIEGAS related to 2018/0178(COD)
Amendment 143 #
Proposal for a regulation
Recital 9
Recital 9
(9) Offering financial products which pursue environmentally sustainable objectives is an effective way of channelling private investments into sustainable activities. National requirements for marketing as sustainable investments financial products and corporate bonds, in particular requirements set out to allow the relevant market actors to use a national label, aim to enhance investor confidence, to create visibility and to address concerns about “greenwashing”. Greenwashing refers to the practice of gaining an unfair competitive advantage by marketing a financial product as environment- friendly, when in fact it does not meet basic environmental standards. Currently a few Member States have in place labelling schemes. They build on different taxonomies classifying environmentally sustainable economic activities. Given the political commitments under the Paris Agreement and at Union level, it The results announced at the recent 24th UN climate conference in Poland (COP24) reflect the failure of all market instruments implemented to date to resolve this clikely that more and more Member States will set up labelling schemes or other requirements on market actors in respect of financial products or corporate bonds marketed as environmentally sustainable. In doing so, Member States would be using their own national taxonomies for the purposes of determining which investments qualify as sustainable. If such national requirements are based on different criteria as to which economic activities qualify as environmentally sustainable, investors will be discouraged from investing across borders, due to difficulties in comparing the different investment opportmate change emergency. It is accordingly necessary to break with all environmental policy guidelines imposed unities. In addition, economic operators wishing to attract investment from across the Union would have to meet different criteria in the various Member States in order for their activities to qualify as environmentally sustainable for the purposes of the different labels. The absence of uniform criteria will thus increase costs and create a significant disincentive for economic operators, amounting to an impediment to access cross-border capital markets for sustainable investments. The barriers to access to cross-border capital markets for the purposes of raising funds for sustainable projects are expected to grow further. The criteria for determining whether an economic activity is environmentally sustainable should therefore be harmonised at Union level, in order to remove obstacles to the functioning of the internal market and prevent their future emergence. With such harmonisation economic operators will find it easier to raise funding for their green activities across borders, as their economic activities can be compared against uniform criteria in order to be selected as underlying assets for environmentally sustainable investments. It will therefore facilitate attracting investment across borders within the Unionl now. A coherent regulatory approach based on the need to ensure public ownership of strategic sectors such as energy, banking and transport must be implemented as a matter of urgency. Unless these conditions are met, CO2 emissions will clearly never diminish sufficiently for achievement of the carbon neutrality indispensable to the survival of our planet.