New community with focus on sustainable finance
The financial services sector has the potential to be a fundamental vehicle to promote sustainability and act as a role model for other actors. However, financial services has not yet taken this lead role despite how topics such as the cost of capital, risk mitigation, financial innovation and digitalisation are at the heart of finance. This is something the Swedish Community for Sustainable Finance wants to change.
”Today we see a completely new momentum surrounding sustainable finance with policy-makers, large investment firms, banks and other financial actors presenting new initiatives on sustainability almost on a daily basis. We need finance and financing to succeed in building more sustainable societies and therefore need active conversations and interdisciplinary collaborations on the topic of sustainable finance” says Dr Viktor Elliot, co-creator of the Swedish Community for Sustainable Finance.
The Swedish community for Sustainable Finance is an initiative from the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg.
The Community is an open forum for dialogue and collaboration between academia, the industry and policymakers on the topic of sustainable finance.
“Initially we strive to create an inclusive and active forum for dialogue on sustainable finance. We have a three-year plan that includes formalisation of an innovation hub that brings together actors from academia, the industry and policy makers to create state-of-art research and innovation within sustainable finance”, says Dr Ylva Baeckström, co-creator of the Swedish Community for Sustainable Finance
Sustainable finance is defined by the European Commission to be “the process of taking due account of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations when making investment decisions in the financial sector, leading to increased longer-term investments into sustainable economic activities and projects.”
The European Commission published its guidelines to help companies disclose environmental and social information in 2017 and from 10 March 2021 the ESG – Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (EU) 2019/2088 (SFDR) started to apply and became mandatory. SFDR applies to financial products, collective investments in transferable securities and financial market participants.
