Description
Greening investments is a top priority for the EU, which requires financial advisers to consider the environmental objectives of their clients and beneficiaries. However, energy efficiency (EE) and sustainable energy (SE) investments face a finance gap. The EU-funded LEVEL EEI project makes these EE and SE products more competitive. It conducts behavioural science field experiments to assess end users’ demands for environmental products. It also reviews the compliance of green marketing claims associated with financial products and evaluate the offer of financial environmental products to meet potential demand by end users. The findings will provide fresh insight into current regulatory schemes, support the spread of the solutions throughout Europe and deliver a database for environmental financial products.
Objectives
Energy Efficiency (EE) and Sustainable Energy (SE) Investments face a finance gap. To help addressing this gap, the project aims at making the financial products contributing to EE/SE more competitive.
In the context of the reforms introduced by the EC on investors’ duties, financial advisors have now an obligation to consider the environmental objectives of their clients and beneficiaries. Our preliminary findings suggest that 2/3 of end-users have such objectives. Building on these findings and the reform, the project will reveal the demand for environmental products, through surveys in 8 countries (360M citizens). We will then verify that end-users ‘walk the talk’ through behavioural science field experiments.
The second part of the project will focus on the offer of “green” products: our lawyers will analyse the compliance of the green marketing claims associated with financial products and recommend best practices and an evolution of the regulatory framework. To help product manufacturers further improve their practices, we will design and pilot-test an environmental management framework for financial products and help strengthen the draft criteria of the related future EU Eco-label.
Finally, to enable the deployment of our solutions across Europe, we will develop a toolkit for both product manufacturers and distributors including an online questionnaire for clients and a database of environmental financial products.
The expected impact is to leverage the demand from end-users to push environmental objectives into institutional investors investment strategies and introduce proper environmental management to ensure that these objectives are translated into additional EE/SE investments in the real economy.
Duration & Budget
LEVEL EEI is a 3 year-project that was launched on 1st September 2020. It is funded by the European Commission’s multi annual framework programme Horizon 2020 for an overall budget of approximately 2.1 million euros.