EVRACSI Webinar Series

The EVRACSI initiative and Webinar Series

The recently published ‘A European Green Deal’ stresses the EU Commission’s increased ambitions to confront climate change. The Commission has developed a detailed action plan on how to finance sustainable growth. This plan extends across the entire international investment chain. The development of a transparent disclosure context supporting this acceleration towards sustainable growth is a key prerequisite.

According to the EU, there is an urgent need to enhance transparency to end-investors and to also find out how financial market actors consider sustainability. Several of the proposed ambitions explicitly highlight the central role played by disclosure in this process. Now the revised NFRD (Non-financial reporting directive), renamed to CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) and the EU Taxonomy regulation is launched and recently EU agreed on new disclosure regulations for sustainability related disclosure in the financial service sectors (EU 2019/2088) and for improvement of sustainability disclosure benchmarks (EU 2019/2089). These regulations constitute a central pillar for improving disclosure by both financial and corporate actors. Disclosure, thus, plays a central role in these efforts.

Succeeding in enhancing sustainability disclosure is crucial for accelerating and reorienting capital flows towards investments promoting sustainable growth. The success relies on an active interaction and engagement of policy makers, financial market actors, companies and the academia. It is time to join forces!

To reach Agenda 2030 and promote a global sustainable development, companies must become more sustainable. In order to maintain an efficient capital market, it is vital for all actors to be able to assess sustainability performance. Reliable assessment of sustainability performance remains a key challenge to the world’s policy makers, financial market actors, industry and academia.

Our webinar series is an attempt to tackle these issues head-on. This high-profile webinar series brings together some of the most prominent players in the quest of developing policies, regulations and disclosure that can provide value relevant, credible and comparable information on how our companies perform on the different sustainability arenas. Succeeding with this is crucial for accelerating and reorienting capital flows towards more sustainable investments. This is vital for developing an efficient and sustainable finance and business industry.

About the webinars

The webinars were broadcasted live in Lund on four occasions during spring 2021 and are available on YouTube. All webinars were hosted by Susanne Arvidsson, Associate professor in finance and accounting at LUSEM and Coordinator of the EVRACSI Initiative, and moderated by Mikael Salo, editor in chief at Aktuell Hållbarhet.

Webinar 1, theme and speakers

What can regulators and policymakers do to empower businesses and financial markets in the transformation to more sustainable development?

Chiara del Prete
Chairperson, EFRAG TEG
Urban Funered
Chief Executive Officer, Swedish Securities Markets Association
Johanna Fager Wettergren
Deputy Executive Director, The Swedish Financial supervisory authority, Member IOSCO task force
Kirsten Margrethe Hovi
Head of Extra-Financial Reporting, Norsk Hydro ASA

Webinar 2, theme and speakers

What are the key components and mechanisms for enabling sustainability to be further integrated into financial market strategies?

Sandra Boss
Senior Managing Director, Global Head of Investment Stewardship for BlackRock, Member of BlackRock’s Global Executive Committee  
Wim Bartels
Member of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, Partner Corporate Reporting at KPMG Netherlands
Helena Viñes Fiestas
Senior policy advisor on sustainable finance, BNP Paribas, and Global Head of Stewardship and Policy, BNP Paribas Asset Management; and rapporteur of the EU Platform on Sustainable Finance. 
Bernard de Longevialle
Global head of Sustainable Finance, Standard & Poor’s

Webinar 3, theme and speakers

What roles do corporate disclosure and transparency play in accelerating this change?

Elena Arveras
Policy Officer Nonfinancial reporting, European Commission
Susanne Stormer
Partner and head of Sustainability at PwC Denmark
Merilin Hörats
Strategy and Business Development Officer in EIF
Liisa Raasakka
Group Head of Office, European Investment Bank Sweden

Webinar 4, theme and speakers

What themes and perspectives are needed on the research agenda to facilitate the required sustainable transformation in the finance and business industry?

Gabriel Wikström
The Swedish Government’s national coordinator for the 2030 Agenda
Begoña Giner
Professor of Accounting and Finance at the University of Valencia, member of EFRAG TEG and Chair of the EAA Stakeholder Reporting Committee
Åsa Moberg
Programmes director at Mistra, board member of SWESIF
John Dumay
Professor of Accounting & Finance, Macquarie University