Swiss ‘green finance’ funds more than double in past year

Keystone / Gian Ehrenzeller

The amount of money in sustainable investment funds in Switzerland has more than doubled in the past year and now comes to CHF775 billion ($836 billion), a study has found.

The number of such funds based in Switzerland grew from 777 to 1,289 in the past 12 months, while the amount of money handled jumped from CHF316 to CHF775 billion (+145%), wroteExternal link the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts on Thursday.

The trend is clear: according to a study published last year, sustainable investments in general have risen from CHF40.6 billion to CHF1.16 trillion over the past decade. Switzerland is also keen to position itself as a leader in the “green finance” field, something the government repeated on Wednesday with its plansExternal link to introduce new “green Confederation bonds”.

However, as the Lucerne study reiterated on Thursday, what counts as “sustainable” is still up for debate, with no standardised set of definitions and criteria internationally recognisable, and fears of “greenwashing” widespread.

At the recent COP26 conference in the Scottish city of Glasgow, a first step was taken to fix this, with the creation of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), which will be based in Frankfurt in Germany and which will publish a first set of global norms next year.

Co-author of the Lucerne study, Manfred Stüttgen, said that strictly speaking “only those funds for which sustainable aspects are essential to the strategy of the fund should be considered as sustainable.”

Some 200 of the 1,289 funds the researchers studied followed “clearly” a climate strategy, which means they directly aimed to decarbonise the investment portfolio and limit climate-related risks. Other funds are “passively” sustainable: i.e. they don’t explicitly invest in environmental projects, but are linked to measures of sustainability.

The total amount of assets in Swiss public investment funds – managed by 214 providers – comes to just over CHF7 trillion, according to the study.