Attractiveness of sustainable business and investments: an ethical, legal or financial issue?

The sustainability flag flies over almost every economic sector: from the financial sphere to the production area, the current attractiveness of sustainability issues is undeniable.But what pushes towards this new concept of making business and investments? Is taking care of the environmental, social and governance issues only due to a change in the ethical perception of investors, compa-nies and consumers? Or is this approach also driven by legal constraints? Can financial and economic factors play a role? And what is the interplay between financial reasons and legal pressure towards sustainable growth? These are certainly not easy questions to answer. They have been addressed at length by sociologists, lawyers and economists. However, these scholars often focus separately on only one part of the problem. A combined approach, instead, seems to be more effective and capable to lead to a better understanding of what is behind the new wave of sustainability, allowing us to address the issue in its complexity. This belief explains the interdisciplinary perspective of this contribution, having the purpose of highlighting some of the legal and financial explanations behind the success of (more or less self-declared) sustainable businesses and investments. To this end, we first focus on the relevance that the sustainability issue is increasingly gaining both from the corporate law and from the financial law perspective, in order to assess to what extent the modern legal systems are moving towards the adoption of higher sustainability standards (Sect. 5.2). Then, we will investigate whether compliance with these standards would just expose businesses to higher costs, or if they can result in more attractive choices also from an economic point of view (Sect. 5.3). We conclude that sustainability starts from a project perspective and make concrete proposals for a differentiated profit and risk assessment.