Project background
Through "sustainable finance", private investments are to stimulate the transformation to an (ecologically) sustainable economy. This basic idea sounds as simple as it is convincing. However, practice shows that the combination of the complex issues of financial markets and sustainability regularly poses new challenges for the various actors. This applies to savers, investors, asset managers and companies as target groups of the planned project. Especially at the local and regional level, the actors often lack the orientation and strategy to effectively implement their own sustainability claim with the (new) regulatory requirements at the European and national level:
In surveys, the actors emphasise that an environmentally friendly form of investment is important to them - also in the field of finance. However, private savers and professional investors often do not know any reliable sources of information on sustainable savings, pension and investment products (and neither do their financial advisors). Asset managers can hardly keep up with the dynamics of the current regulation and the resulting requirements on sustainable finance and are looking for the information relevant to them. Finally, companies are facing new obligations to report on sustainability aspects in order to be able to serve the information needs of the financial sector. Last but not least, decision-makers in regional politics and administrations are only partially aware of the opportunities that sustainable finance offers for more sustainable development in their regions to finance more and better environmental protection.
Project goals and measures
In all countries involved, there are initiatives at the national level to redirect finances more strongly than before towards an ecological transformation. In order to make these national activities more effective, they need to be complemented at the regional level to motivate and inform the people of the target groups on the ground in their personal environments and to network them in a targeted manner for even greater effectiveness.
This is where the project "turnaroundmoney" starts with all partners and their regions: Through motivation, education and networking, local decision-makers and multipliers, starting in four European model regions, are to be enabled to implement effective sustainable finance strategies themselves, to ensure dissemination in their region and thus to decisively support environmental protection. The current regulatory "top-down" approach of the EU is thus to be complemented by a civil society "bottom-up" approach from the region.
To this end, project activities are: The analysis of regional environmental protection and sustainability development plans, the involvement of multipliers and decision-makers through personal interviews, workshops based on these (two per region) and the development of "turnaroundmoney Action Plans".
The Action Plans developed provide catalogues of measures agreed upon with the actors. Through this participatory approach, the chance of implementing sustainable finance measures is very high, which in turn advances environmental protection.
The turnaroundmoney approach is based on the positive experiences with municipal, participatory climate protection plans in Germany, which have been available for almost 30 years and which have contributed or are still contributing to the implementation on the ground as important transformation belts of national efforts. The project aims to create analogous pilot regions that serve as models for many more "Local Sustainable Finance Action Plans" for the actors of other regions later on.