ACR Capital Markets

U.S. municipalities are increasingly turning to the green bond market to raise capital for infrastructure with climate and other environmental benefits. As the market has grown, so too have investor demands for greater impact disclosure in the form of quantified metrics.

The American Carbon Registry’s Green Finance Impact Program seeks to deliver on investor demands and further mobilize capital markets to fill the multi-trillion-dollar investment gap in sustainable public infrastructure. ACR’s transparent and evidence-based approach to demonstrating the environmental benefits of green finance results in standardized, normalized, and quantified environmental key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow for meaningful comparison across projects and bond issuances. The Program advances multiple goals:

Enhances the Capacity of Issuers to:

• Quantify the environmental impacts of bond issuances;
• Compare planned approaches to maximize benefits; and
• Effectively and confidently communicate environmental impacts to stakeholders.

Empowers Investors and Underwriters to:

• Access environmental KPIs from a trusted source;
• Elevate the consideration of environmental impact in decision making; and
• Assess impact over time at the project, asset, and bond levels.

The Green Finance Impact Program offers a suite of products for use by municipal issuers, investors, underwriters, and other market participants. These include:

Green Finance Impact Methodologies quantify relevant and project-specific environmental KPIs using consistent and transparent approaches. The methodologies calculate indicators appropriate to the project type and contain U.S. specific benchmarks that are used to compare impacts relative to a representative standard of performance.

Calculator Tools are easy-to-use, online calculators that embed the equations found in the methodologies and translate project specific user inputs into environmental KPIs and comparable outputs.

The methodologies and calculator tools:

• Build upon broader efforts to harmonize impact reporting in the green bond market by quantifying core indicators proposed in other frameworks and providing guidance on how to apply these in the U.S. municipal context.
• Provide ex-ante estimates in advance of project implementation and ex-post assessments to support issuers’ ongoing tracking of project performance.

Green Finance Impact Registry Platform displays the results from the ACR methodologies and calculator tools via an online interface that enables discovery of environmental impacts of bond issuances. The Registry Platform displays:

• Bonds and associated projects with their environmental KPIs;
• Impacts relative to established benchmarks; and
• Other related climate and social impact disclosure information.

• Read More About ACR