The new eligibility criteria for this label, created in 2016 to identify sustainable funds, will come into force on March 1, 2024, according to the Bercy press release.
Bercy wants finance to play its part in the fight against global warming. From March 2024, funds investing in companies that exploit coal or unconventional hydrocarbons, as well as those that launch new hydrocarbon-related projects, will no longer be eligible for the “Socially Responsible Investment” (SRI) label. announced Tuesday, November 7, the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire. The main reference in France for identifying sustainable funds, this label, created in 2016, is currently awarded to 1,174 funds, for total assets of 773 billion euros.
“We must offer a simple and effective label to allow the French to give meaning to their savings”, declared Bruno Le Maire, in a press release, making a “unavoidable” in the fight against global warming. “We will thus allow savers to take into account the ecological transition and businesses to finance their decarbonization more easily”he added.
The new eligibility criteria will be published by the end of November, according to the Bercy press release.
A tool that excludes projects incompatible with the climate crisis
“If the criteria will be specified in the new framework, it is certain that companies such as TotalEnergies, BP or ENI will be excluded from the investment scope”, reacted Antoine Laurent, France advocacy manager of the NGO Reclaim Finance. “This is a major step forward for this label in search of credibility and a clear and welcome signal sent ahead of COP28 on the urgency of withdrawing financing from fossil fuels and redirecting it towards sustainable energies.”
The committee which manages this label has been considering new rules for more than two years, after accusations of “inevitable loss of credibility and relevance” formulated in a report from the General Inspectorate of Finance. At the end of October, NGOs and climate specialists called for toughening the ISR label by excluding oil companies, in order to maintain its credibility.
In its latest report, the IPCC pleads for “a significant reduction in investment in coal, oil and gas.” However, the giants of the sector continue to regularly announce the exploitation of new deposits, contrary to the ambitions displayed by the signatory countries of the Paris agreement. Thus, at the end of September, Greenpeace accused TotalEnergies of being involved in 33 gas and oil extraction sites “super-emitters” in greenhouse gases, as an operator or as a shareholder. Of the “climate bombs” which, according to the NGO, could emit more than a billion tonnes of CO2 if their actual oil or gas reserves were exploited (another definition of “climate bombs” judges their impact on their total operating life).