At our IIF Sustainable Finance and Global Debt & Financial Stability Roundtables last week, key themes included net zero transition finance as well as the impact of higher funding costs for vulnerable sovereign and corporate borrowers.

The IIF Sustainable Finance Monitor for Q1 discusses key trends shaping the global sustainable finance agenda (including climate competitiveness and scenario analysis), regulatory, policy, and research developments, and shares updates on the IIF's sustainable finance activities.

Despite the urgency of fighting climate change, the exploration and development of new energy technologies to replace fossil fuels could take many generations. Strong policy support to incentivize front-loaded investment could significantly shorten the time that it takes to develop new green technologies—improving nuclear energy provision, green hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, biomass etc.

Just Energy Partnerships—launched at COP26 to help emerging economies shift to clean energy—aim to mobilize international public and private capital to accelerate electrification in emerging and developing economies. Most existing JETP funding commitments are from traditional development finance institutions, including multilateral development banks (MDBs). However, a key goal of JETPs is to leverage public funding to catalyze private capital.

ESG fund flows have picked up, amid easier financial conditions and growing demand. Global climate flows surpassed $1.1 billion in 2022 - up over 25% from $870 billion in 2021. On average, ESG stocks and bonds are up by some 5% in 2023 ytd. Global sustainable/ESG debt issuance was down over 15% to $1.3 trillion in 2022, from $1.5 trillion in 2021. We project global ESG debt issuance to climb to $1.7 trillion in 2023 and near $2 trillion in 2024.

Progress by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (IC-VCM) and the release of the Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) will help address ongoing concerns about voluntary carbon credit quality—a must to support market expansion; Greater price transparency will also help: in this first edition of our new Voluntary Carbon Markets Monitor, we introduce a registry transparency index to assess disclosure of the registries that track and validate the quality of carbon credit projects.

The ESG debt universe is fast approaching the $5 trillion mark, up from $3.4 trillion in 2021. While rising global rates weighed on total issuance in 2022, issuance in emerging markets remained strong, reaching an all-time high of $260 billion—mostly driven by China.

A commitment to net-zero requires financial firms to transform themselves and manage down their risks—in so doing, they drive real-world change by engaging with customers and markets, and ultimately enabling entire economies to transition to a low-carbon future. This unique position in the global economy makes it incumbent on financial firms to design credible decarbonization strategies, with everything that entails.