What’s Happening in Sustainable Finance: A Flurry of Updates in Regulations, Taxonomies, Frameworks, and Much More

Regulation, Guidance and Taxonomy Updates Keep Market Participants on Their Toes  

In this episode, Nick and Nishant discuss the flurry of updates in the sustainable finance regulation and guidance space. The European Union has reached a long-awaited deal on the first set of comprehensive rules for issuing green bonds. Although voluntary, the EU Green Bond Standards will help investors identify high-quality green bonds and may set a precedent for other jurisdictions.  

The Green Loan Principles, Social Loan Principles, and Sustainability-Linked Loan Principles were also recently updated to align more closely to current market practice and provide additional guidance to borrowers (e.g., recommendations that borrowers obtain an independent external review of their green, social and sustainability-linked loan processes). Other updates include recommendations for the sustainable finance taxonomies being developed in Australia and Canada, as well as the new draft version of the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework.        

What the Final TNFD Framework Could Mean for Sustainable Finance  

With the release of the fourth beta framework from the TNFD, market participants eagerly await the final version, due to be published this fall. This latest beta release includes a full draft reporting framework and a set of disclosure metrics, along with assessment metrics to be used by companies. The disclosure metrics will also include some core measures which are applicable to all sectors. The final framework will help to standardize the sustainability metrics companies report on, making them usable in sustainability-linked instruments and speeding up the framework’s adoption.  

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