By the European Central Bank’s own admission, this is only a first step. But the monetary institution has finally entered into the concrete in its work to fight against climate change. Since October, and at a more sustained pace since February, it has reduced its investments in the most polluting companies and replaced them with more virtuous ones.
Thursday, March 23, it published, for the first time, the figures of its action. In the fourth quarter of 2022, over the first three months of its new policy, its investments concerned companies whose intensity of CO emissions2i.e. CO emissions2 compared to their turnover, were down 65% compared to the previous three quarters.
This is however only one “encouraging initial indication”, acknowledges the ECB. Because the work has only just begun. The institution is currently at the head of a large portfolio of corporate bonds, accumulated since 2018, for a total of 385 billion euros. These investments were made according to the previous orthodoxy, namely that central bank intervention had to be done in a way ” neutral “ across all financial markets. However, the big oil companies, the energy companies or the industrialists who emit the most greenhouse gases are over-represented there. As a result, the ECB’s portfolio is mainly made up of big polluters: three-quarters of the bonds it has bought come from companies that are part of the half that emit the most greenhouse gases.
Too slow a pace
The objective now is to “green” this portfolio. In any case, it will necessarily take a long time, but circumstances will slow down this work. Inflation has been making a comeback for a year, and the ECB has stopped actively buying new corporate bonds, seeking instead to withdraw from them. The institution is therefore content to wait for its bonds to mature, and replaces them as they go along by reinvesting in other, less polluting companies.
A far too slow pace, according to Stanislas Jourdan, of the Positive Money Europe association: “We appreciate the efforts of the ECB to correct the mistakes made in 2018 by blindly following the logic of market neutrality. Nevertheless, the ECB’s policy remains very far from the European Union’s climate objectives. » Aware of the problem, the ECB announced in February that it would “accelerate” its greening.
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