Financial firms dropped terms like “ESG” (Environmental, Social and Governance) and “sustainable” from the names of hundreds of their funds in the year before new European Union rules to clamp down on greenwashing came into force in late May, new analysis shows.
The rules from the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) say that funds with certain sustainability or environmental-related terms in their names cannot invest in companies that get more than a certain share of their revenue from coal, oil, gas or particularly polluting electricity generation.
Those funds now also have to show that 80% of their investments meet the ESG objectives referred to in their titles.
Before the new regulation was introduced, the fund managers that dropped environmental and other sustainability terms from the highest percentage of their fund names were State Street, UBS and Northern Trust, the analysis said. It estimates that around 674 funds have done this overall.
Alison Schultz, an analyst at the German campaign group Finanzwende who conducted the research, said fund managers had earlier betrayed investors’ trust by labelling their funds wrongly and misdirecting money that should have helped to advance the green transition towards supporting business as usual.
“Consumers bought the funds because they wanted to invest sustainably,” she said, adding that “renaming [them] instead of divesting undermines the credibility of a market that depends on financial products being what they claim to be”.
Many fund managers have replaced ESG terminology in the titles of their funds with alternative words like “screened”, “selection” or “committed”, according to research by Finanzwende, Urgewald and Facing Finance and a separate analysis from Morningstar Analytics, which sells research and information to investors.
For example, Invesco changed its “Sustainable Eurozone Equity Fund” into the “Transition Eurozone Equity Fund” in March. Fund documents show that in April 2025 it had investments in Italy’s Enel and Germany’s E.ON, two utilities that sell gas and fossil-fuel electricity.
“Screened” and “transition” funds
Funds with words like “screened” or “transition” in their name can continue to invest as much as they want in oil, gas and coal businesses under the new EU regulations. Hortense Bioy, head of sustainable investing research at Morningstar, told Climate Home the use of words like this suggests fund managers “are still keen to offer products that signal ESG characteristics in the name”.
According to earlier research on the same topic released in March by Urgewald and Facing Finance, more than half of the funds that have dropped environmental-related terms from their names held shares in large fossil fuel companies – with the investments worth around €14bn ($16bn). The name changes mean that they can keep those investments.
While some have gone down this path, Morningstar analysis suggests others have done the opposite – ditching fossil fuels investments and keeping their green names. Leading global fund managers like US-based BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, have taken a varied approach across their portfolios.
An email BlackRock sent to clients on March 18, which it shared with Climate Home, said it had responded to the ESMA naming guidelines by changing the names of 56 funds worth $51bn to drop sustainability terms. An example it gave was dropping “ESG” from the BSF Systematic ESG World Equity Fund.
On the other hand, the email said it had kept the ESG names of another 60 funds worth $92bn, “enhancing the sustainable characteristics”.
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Morningstar found that ESG funds which did not rebrand themselves as less green were investing less in fossil fuel companies like TotalEnergies, Galp and Eni in March this year compared to May 2024.
“It is fair to assume that part of the decline can be attributed to stock divestments made to comply with the ESMA guidelines,” their analysis said.
While State Street renamed the highest percentage of these funds, other firms – like BlackRock and Amundi – have lots of sustainability-related funds that were grouped under broad EU green financial disclosure categories but never had these now-regulated terms in their names.
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Last July, Climate Home revealed that EU-based funds like Blackrock’s, which claimed to be environmentally friendly, held shares worth at least $65 million in major coal companies. Under the new rules, they can continue as long as they don’t have “environmental” or “sustainable” terms in their name.
While funds with what the ESMA calls environmental, impact or sustainability related terms cannot invest in companies with fossil fuel revenues above a certain threshold (see chart above), funds with transition-related terms still can. These words include “transition”, “improve”, “progress”, “evolution”, “transformation” and “net zero”.
BlackRock also said it had either changed the names or investment methodologies of 18 funds worth $42bn for a “clearer alignment to transition” in response to the new rules.
Investors notified
Fund managers are required to notify investors of the name changes, usually in prospectuses sent to professional investment managers.
Bioy of Morningstar said she had seen many of these notifications and, in some of them, fund managers told investors they were lowering their sustainable investment allocations. “Some of them are not as ESG as they used to be,” she said. “They’ve become almost like traditional funds.”
But she said that firms that have renamed their funds cannot necessarily be accused of greenwashing before because there were “no rules” over what terms like ESG and sustainable meant. Investors now need to be educated on what these terms legally mean according to the new rules, she added.
The rules only affect funds marketed in EU countries but, according to Bioy, that is the vast majority of the world’s funds that make green claims, even though they make up a small proportion of the total.
Asked to comment, a BlackRock spokesperson told Climate Home the investment objectives of its funds “are clearly disclosed in each fund’s prospectus and on BlackRock’s website”.
Funds “are managed in line with applicable regulations governing sustainable investing”, they said, adding that “for investors that have decarbonization investment objectives we offer a range of products that provide such exposure”.
At the time of publication, State Street, UBS, Northern Trust and Invesco had not responded to requests for comment.
The post As EU acts to stop greenwash, funds drop climate claims from their names appeared first on Climate Home News.
As EU acts to stop greenwash, funds drop climate claims from their names
Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.
The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.
These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.
They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”.
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Exemption push rejected
More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.
Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.
They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.
But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.
‘New paradigm’
The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing.
For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists.
Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added.
Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.
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Pushback over science
As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.
The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves.
While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.
A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.
Policy discounts questioned
To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting.
That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme.
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced.
“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.
Moving target
A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes.
These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”.
Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.
Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.
“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.
The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.