Sustainable Finance

MARKET HIGHLIGHTS | OCTOBER 2021

According to the Climate Bonds Initiative, the total volumes for Green, Social, Sustainability, and Sustainability-linked (GSSS) bonds reached USD 496.1bn in the first half of 2021, representing 59% year-on-year growth from the equivalent period in 2020, and this trend seems to have continued in the third quarter of 2021.

However, the success of the market should not compromise its integrity, as as ING and Natixis remind us. In this endeavor, ISS ESG’s Second Party Opinion (SPO) Services provide issuers with a credible and independent assessment of the sustainability quality of their bonds*. Those that meet ISS ESG’s rigorous global standards give sustainability-oriented investors security that the projects they fund are suitably sustainable. To name a recent few, SMI Group and Deutsche Telekom published their sustainability-linked frameworks focused respectively on circular economy KPIs and GHG emissions reduction. Republic of Serbia added its name to the list of sovereign issuers financing green projects to mitigate climate change effects. As ever, we are proud of our clients’ successes, and invite you to see a summary of SPOs delivered in Q3 2021 in the full list below.

 

As expected, sustainable finance regulatory  institutions were active too. The EU Platform on Sustainable Finance published two draft reports about an extension of the current green taxonomy to significantly harmful (SH) and no significant impact (NSI) activities and a social taxonomy proposal, which has already spurred considerable debate amongst market players.

*By way of background, ISS Corporate Solutions (ICS) works in collaboration with ISS ESG, the responsible investment arm of Institutional Shareholder Services, as the distributor of SPOs. While the SPOs are sold and distributed by ICS, the analytical work to prepare and issue SPOs is performed by ISS ESG.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Join ISS Corporate Solutions for critical discussions this month in a series of events with great leaders in the Sustainable Finance space.

As external reviewers, ISS ESG has delivered over 350 SPOs according to rigorous and well-respected standards. Below is a summary of our client successes in Q3 2021.