Agenda - Contents

Keynote: Climate crisis - Quo Vadis?

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In just a few years, Green Finance has evolved from a niche to an omnipresent topic. Regulators, researchers, the financial sector, associations, non-governmental organizations and an increasing number of new players are engaged in a sometimes confusing and extremely dynamic discourse. It is time to take stock. The key question must be: Does green finance work? Or - to what extent the ambitions are met that aim at rendering the financial sector a catalyst for a successful transformation?

André Weidenhaupt, General Director, Ministry for the Environment, Climate and Sustainable Development
Georg Rebernig, General Manager, Environment Agency Austria,
Laura Gehlkopf, Coordinator ESG, Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier
Jacob Thomä, Managing Director, 2° Investing Initiative, Senior Fellow at the SOAS Centre for Sustainable Finance

Green Finance started with climate, with the Paris Agreement and the recognition that financial flows need to be aligned in a climate-compatible way. Climate expressed in terms of greenhouse gas equivalents and finance expressed in terms of money, risk and probability values, were compatible quite quickly, despite initial uncertainties. Using the example of this
oldest and so far most differentiated area of green finance, we want to look at what has been achieved and what has been missed, as well as what the next stops on the way to a climate-friendly society should be and how they can be financed.

Nicoletta Centofanti, General Manager, Luxembourg Sustainable Finance Initiative
Stephan Peters, CEO & Managing Director, International Climate Finance Accelerator
Julia Symon, Head of Research and Advocacy, Financewatch (virtual)
Nathalie Roth, Managing Director and Founder, 4Climate
Stephan Fahr, Senior Team Lead – Financial Stability, Europäische Zentralbank

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Where do we stand with the goal of promoting sustainable business models or activities via advantageous financing conditions? What are the opportunities, risks and flaws in this context? Which activities or business models work within the logic of taxonomy and traditional bank financing? What other forms of financing are needed beyond that - in Europe and the world?

Michael Halling, Professor and Chair for Sustainable Finance, University of Luxembourg
Christina Ehlert, Head of Programmes – Agriculture and Forestry Value Chains, ADA
Rudi Belli, Senior Vice President & Head of Department, Spuerkeess
Fabian Söffge, Partner, Argos Wityu, Argos Climate Action Fund

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Within this workshop we want to explore the diversity of financing practices that local and community-based actors draw from, illustrated with examples from Luxembourg. Aiming at social and environmental impacts within their respective community and thereby deliberately exploring financing and/or funding from outside conventional credit relations, these actors face certain challenges and opportunities, when operating and aligning their financing practices with their objectives that diverge from conventional profit maximization logics.

Elena Emrick-Schmitz, Researcher, AltFin project, University of Luxembourg

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 tell which sustainability claims are trustworthy? We will take a look at green bonds, additionality, and the importance of the reference product. Afterwards, we will look at how to avoid greenwashing from investment funds, talking about the importance of considering indirect – supply chain – impacts, trade-offs between environmental impacts and unpacking positive impact creation.

Ioana Popescu, Researcher, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST)

The investment fund industry is at the forefront of the growth in sustainable finance, with increased demand for green financial products and profound changes in the design and regulation of mutual funds. In this workshop, Francois Koulischer will present preliminary results from two research projects. The first project evaluates how the global investment fund industry responded to the rise in demand for ‘green’ assets. Using data on holdings of all equity funds in Europe and North America, the authors quantify the size of green investment funds considering two measures of greenness - carbon intensity and deviation of intensity from sector median. The second project focuses on the role of environmental preferences and assesses how investors from different countries reacted to the introduction of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). Using data on the holders of investment fund shares, the research shows that countries with stronger environmental preferences rebalanced more towards sustainable (article 8 and 9) funds after the introduction of the SFDR.

Francois Koulischer, Assistant Professor, University of Luxembourg