Sustainable finance products are not yet fully regulated, making it hard to distinguish genuine sustainability from greenwashing. How can we use the pillars of life cycle sustainability assessment to better measure and evaluate sustainability claims?
In the REFUND project, we develop metrics based on life cycle assessment methodologies that can estimate impacts at company, investment fund and bond level. Specifically, we use the input-output database EXIOBASE and the life cycle inventory database ecoinvent to derive environmental and social impact factors that can be matched with revenue and production-level information related to financial instruments. We conduct several case studies, such as corporate green bonds and investment funds self-labelled under the EU SFDR Article 8 and Article 9. We discuss key findings based on our model estimates, as well areas for improvement.