Hello, welcome to Impact Insights.

The podcast series powered by Astira Investment Managers.

Many people are worried about the impact of their actions and they want to make a positive

contribution with their investments as well.

But how to choose a reliable sustainable investment partner?

In today's episode, Natasha Gerda, head of research at Astoria, explains why transparency is crucial in sustainable investing.

A white choice of sustainability products is now available in the market, and the growing demand from investor might create room for mis-selling of ESG-labeled products. That is mainly due to

the lack of definitions, standards, and transparency imply a risk of greenwashing.

So all ESG or impact investments are exposed to the risk of greenwashing.

So it's important to ensure that the end investor investors have access to adequate and

understandable information on the sustainability level of

investments to prevent potential greenwashing. So we need to facilitate a wider and better

flow of information about the effects of investments when claiming sustainability credentials.

So today we see a growing number of emerging finance taxonomies which still try to clarify what it means to be sustainable.

In this context, the EU taxonomy is a pioneer in this field, and it's going to be instrumental in

achieving the emissions reduction and mitigation goals of the European Union Green Deal.

So by imposing a legal requirement of disclosure, the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation is extremely

useful in creating a whole chain of accountability that makes the information more robust.

So the main benefits of this SFDR regulation and others is their ability to increase the amount of information available

for the investors.

It makes fund managers liable for any misrepresentation in the sustainability claims.

Having said that, it's quite complicated if the companies are not reporting the data themselves.

...