How the EU should to respond to the challenge of greenwashing?

Abstract

The Paris Agreement has set out specific requirements for controlling global warming, which has made it imperative for companies to incorporate the environment as well as sustainability into their business strategies. However, the problem of greenwashing, whereby companies disguise the fact that they are not green by claiming to be green, is also occurring more and more. There is also a growing body of research on this type of greenwashing. This paper reviews some of the definitions of greenwashing in the literature and, by analyzing the greenwashing scandals of ExxonMobil and Shell as well as the climate litigation, concludes that the EU legislation has a great advantage in solving the problem of greenwashing, especially by multinational corporations. However, as these regulations have only come into force in the last few years, a number of issues are still waiting to be resolved. Therefore, more research is needed to explore the issue of EU legislation and greenwashing, and to consider how to deal with the inadequacy of existing legislation.