The Sustainable Finance Roadmap sets out the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) priority areas in sustainable finance for the period 2022 – 2024. Issued on February 11, the roadmap identifies ESMA’s priority areas as well as the most impacted sectors identified. It also addresses the individual priorities and their challenges.

ESMA’s priority areas focus on the following:

• Tackling greenwashing and promoting transparency to address the challenges related to misrepresentation or wrongful disclosure, mis-selling or the lack of clear and common labels for ESG investment products or incorrect information about the alignment with the EU taxonomy.

• Building NCAs’ and ESMA’s capacities to establish a common supervisory culture, enable national competent authorities (NCAs) to have not only a good handling of the relevant legislation but also a good understanding of the intersection between sustainability matters and finance.

• Monitoring, assessing and analyzing ESG markets and risks to identify emerging trends, risks and vulnerabilities that can have a high impact on investor protection.

To address these three priorities, ESMA will take a comprehensive list of actions that will include assessing greenwashing market practices, contributing to consistency of sustainable finance legislation, promoting financial education, collecting data on distribution of ESG products and contributing to prospectus requirements for green, social and sustainable securities.

The actions will focus on the following sectors: investment management, investment services, issuers’ disclosure and governance, benchmarks, credit and ESG ratings, trading and post-trading and financial innovation.