ESG in the insurance sector - draft opinion of EIOPA on the fight against greenwashing

EIOPA has noted an increased appetite among European insurance consumers and pension savers to purchase sustainable insurance or pension products. This has resulted in an increased offering of such products by insurance and pension providers, but also a corresponding increase in misleading sustainability claims, known as 'greenwashing'. According to EIOPA, sustainability claims are claims related to the sustainability profile of an entity or product that depict that products or entities benefit from sustainability factors or that products or entities take sustainability aspects into account. These claims can be misleading in various ways, for example: selective disclosure, empty claims, omission or insufficient disclosure, vagueness or vagueness, inconsistency, lack of meaningful comparisons or thresholds, unsubstantiated, misleading images or sounds, irrelevance, outdated information, misleading terminology regarding sustainability or falsity. (Pierre-Michaël de Waersegger, Emmanuelle Mousel)