EU: ESAs publish final report on SFDR RTS amendments for gas and nuclear activities

On 30 September 2022, the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) published their final report on a draft RTS amending Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2022/1288 (SFDR RTS) to add disclosures to provide transparency about investments in taxonomy-aligned gas and nuclear economic activities. The press release is available here. 

The European Commission had asked the ESAs to propose amendments to the SFDR RTS in April 2022 following the approval of the Complementary Delegated Act (CDA) which included, under certain conditions, nuclear and gas energy activities in the list of economic activities covered by the EU Taxonomy. Please see our previous blog posts on the CDA here and here. 

Specifically, the draft RTS:

• add a "yes/no" question in the financial product templates to identify whether the financial product intends to invest in such activities; if the answer is "yes", a graphical representation of the proportion of investments in such activities would be required; and
• implement revisions to the RTS to correct “inconsistencies” observed after its publication (including a change to Article 55 to remove the pre-condition of “commitment” and instead to simply refer to financial products referred to in Article 6 of the Taxonomy Regulation).

The European Commission will scrutinise the draft RTS and endorse them within three months of their publication. Due to the urgency of the matter and the challenging 1 January 2023 application timeline of the CDA, the ESAs have left it to the Commission to include an expected application date when they endorse the draft RTS.