Study reveals decline in sustainable fund investments due to greenwashing surge

A recent study conducted by Elise Gourier and Helene Mathurin at ESSEC Business School has uncovered a concerning trend: investments in sustainable funds are dwindling due to a surge in greenwashing and growing skepticism towards Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) focused investing.

Greenwashing, the act of misleadingly presenting products as environmentally friendly, has escalated significantly over the past five years, particularly within the financial sector, according to the whitepaper. The study tracked the rising prominence of this issue by employing natural language processing to analyze a vast corpus of news articles mentioning greenwashing or related terms.