Green transparency doesn’t help – investors only move when pollution hurts profits

Green transparency doesn’t help – investors only move when pollution hurts profits
If a business faces financial penalties for high emissions, share prices dip and investors look elsewhere. (Image: Getty)
Frances Cook
Transparency about a company's emissions isn’t enough, says a new report.Carbon emissions need to have a financial penalty applied to create shareholder pressure for businesses to improve their climate performance. That’s the result of new analysis from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has released a new paper “The Carrot and the Stock: In Search of Stock-Market Incentives for Decarbonization”.The researchers analysed 338 publicly-traded companies in Europe and the European Union (EU) Emissions Tradi...

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