Find the new article by Ydriss ZIANE, Senior Lecturer HDR at the Sorbonne Business School.
The Cour of Audit has severely pinpointed, in its latest report, the banking sector's lack of involvement in the energy transition. It's not easy for banks to give up financing polluting but profitable activities. According to the Court, the financial sector, while communicating massively on environmental issues, is in fact blurring the trail by putting forward greening objectives that are at once "not very quantifiable, not very closely monitored and not very comparable", greenwashing, in short.
At a time when, for the second year in a row, the sector is announcing record profits, the necessary reallocation of assets appears to be of "very limited scope", according to the Court. At the beginning of 2023, Société Générale's life insurance euro fund will include just 5% green investments. And meanwhile, French banks continue to get involved in fossil fuel bond issues. Between 2016 and 2023, they collaborated on no less than half of these transactions, worldwide. [...]