CITY AM – Green claims unnerve city investors

New study: What’s holding back sustainable funds? Greenwashing.

CITYAM SAYS Investments into sustainable funds are reducing due to an increase in greenwashing and scepticism towards environment, social and governance focused investing, a new study has found.

The whitepaper from Elise Gourier and Helene Mathurin at ESSEC Business School found that the issue of greenwashing had become “particularly prominent in the past five years”, especially within the financial industry.

Greenwashing is when companies present misleading information about how environmentally friendly their products are.

Through using natural language processing to analyse hundreds of thousands of news articles that mention greenwashing or terms associated with it, the study tracked the prominence of the issue.

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