DATE PUBLISHED: April 17, 2024
April 2024 | Sustainable Finance Market Highlights
MARKET AND REGULATORY HIGHLIGHTS
- The first quarter of 2024 registered a total volume of $285bn in GSS+ bond and loan issuances, showing signals of recovery compared to the last quarter of 2023, according to Environmental Finance (EF data).
- With this addition, the market has now surpassed $4 trillion (EF data). This encouraging start of the year has been fueled by a rise in transition issuances, which are expected to become one of the key themes in the sustainable finance world, as highlighted by Nordea among others (Nordea).
- In parallel with the expected rise of transition issuances the topic of greenwashing is attracting increased scrutiny from the market (ICMA).
- To help mitigate these risks on the consumer front, the EU commission at the end of March put forward the “Green Claims” Directive, which addresses voluntary statements about environmental characteristics that refer to products as well as entities, requiring their claims to be robustly substantiated and independently verified (EU Commission).
- Staying on the topic of EU regulations, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s financial markets regulator and supervisor, has launched a consultation period on the standard related to the registration and supervision of external reviewers under the EU Green Bond Regulation (ESMA).
- This represents an important step towards the definition of a regulatory panorama in which eternal review providers will be able to verify EU Green Bonds. For that, it is worth remembering that ISS-Corporate will keep offering assessments against the EU Taxonomy and the current version of the EU Green Bond Standard on a “best efforts basis” until guidelines by the EU Commission and ESMA become public.
