Sustainable investment - a term with many facets

The EU Commission wants to direct more capital flows into sustainable investments in the future in order to make a contribution to the implementation of the Paris climate protection agreement. A necessary condition for this is that a uniform understanding of the concept of "sustainable investment" is created.

A difficult undertaking, not only because the approaches used by sustainable funds to select their investments vary greatly from product to product. They range from simple exclusions to the integration of sustainability criteria into classical financial analysis to the targeted exercise of voting rights at annual general meetings. Also every individual has a different cultural, economic or even religious idea of what is concretely sustainable. The diversity of the investment solutions offered is primarily the result of market economy processes and thus an expression of different ideas and preferences of the players involved. It remains to be seen whether the EU Commission will succeed in finding a definition of sustainability that is satisfactory for all actors and at the same time not discretionary and thus meaningless.

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