This investigation, called “The Great Green Investment Investigation”, is the result of a collaboration between a dozen European media, including The worldinitiated by the Dutch platforms I invest et Follow the Money. It relates exclusively to the investment funds which claim to be the most “sustainable”, in the so-called “article 9” category of European regulations.
There is no public directory of these placements and their contents. To analyze them, we started from a list provided by the analysis company Morningstar, supplemented by financial data compiled by Bloomberg. This made it possible to build a database of 838 funds marketed in Europe (including 526 in France) and a list of 130,766 assets they held as of June 30, 2022, representing 619 billion euros (approximately 5% of total European investments, according to Morningstar). This census lacks data concerning a quarter of the funds identified at the outset.
We have retained a minimum definition of environmentally “unsustainable” investments, focusing on companies that clearly ignore the fight against global warming, fossil fuels in mind. To identify them, we based ourselves on the census of the German environmental protection NGO Urgewald, which has the advantage of including only those players whose plan to phase out fossil fuels is considered insufficient. The detailed methodology can be consulted here, for coal and here, for oil and gas. Companies in the aviation sector (airlines and airports), an activity that emits a lot of greenhouse gases, have also been considered by default as “unsustainable”.
Finally, there are green bonds issued by companies that aim to exclusively finance environmentally friendly projects. The green bonds (green bonds) of these companies, even polluting ones, were not identified as “unsustainable” within the framework of this survey. For this, we used data compiled by the specialist British NGO Climate Bonds Initiative.