The European Parliament has adopted (as of 18 June 2020) new legislation on sustainable investments.
The new law was published in the Official Journal of the European Union last week and will come into effect on 12 July 2020. It sets out six environmental objectives and permits economic activities of investors and undertakings to be labelled as ‘environmentally sustainable’ only if they contribute to at least one of the objectives without significantly harming any of the others.
This is the first time that there will be a uniform set of pan-EU criteria for determining whether economic activity is environmentally sustainable. Such criteria will assist investors and consumers in identifying economic activity which they can participate in without sacrificing environmental standards.