Making Sustainable Finance Work in Germany

In cooperation with firms, financial institutions and policy makers, we tackle the key pain points of CSRD implementation, co-develop scalable support formats and solutions, and make the strategic benefits of sustainability reporting more visible and accessible for firms in Germany. By making sustainable finance work in practice, this pilot project contributes to changing the narrative from reporting “burden” to “opportunity”.

• We act as a sparring-partner for firms motivated to implement sustainable finance regulation and gain insights on key pain points that policy makers need to address.
• We facilitate information exchange between large firms and SMEs in their supply chains to demonstrate how to tackle data challenges related to value chain reporting.
• We support the dialogues between corporate and financial sector actors to facilitate the financing of credible transition plans.
• We help firms share their success stories to inspire peers and shape the narrative from reporting “burden” to “opportunity”.
• We channel project insights into policy making processes to support continuous improvement of sustainable finance regulation and the support of its implementation.

The potential of sustainable finance regulation is immense. Much of its potential hinges on establishing transparency about firms’ sustainability risks and impacts. Stakeholders like investors, customers or governments can only consider corporate sustainability performance in their (investment) decisions, when they have access to meaningful and usable data. This is why disclosure related policies like the CSRD and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) are a big step in the right direction. When implemented right, the impacts of the CSRD and ESRS can extend far beyond improvements in stakeholders’ decision-making: They can lead to positive changes in firms’ behaviour, because firms anticipate stakeholders’ sustainability preferences and are thus incentivised to engage in and disclose good sustainability performance.

We work closely together with partners from the private and financial sector, as well as policy makers, to gain practical insights on the challenges that risk compromising the full potential of sustainable finance regulation, as well as on the opportunities that we can leverage to support the successful and impactful implementation of sustainable finance regulation. We are the credible and supportive sparring partner for employees implementing complex sustainable finance regulations in firms, we gather practical insights on the support formats needed, we feed insights back to policy makers, and we develop solutions to scale up support for effective implementation of sustainable finance policies. We make sustainable finance work.

We are currently forming our project consortium. If you are

• working on sustainability reporting in a German firm,
• a politician that seeks to drive sustainable finance forward, or
• working in a financial institution exploring financial products for the transition

you can still apply to join our project! Just contact us directly via email.