It has been estimated that it will cost $2 trillion to bring U.S. infrastructure into a state of good repair and an additional $2 trillion to meet the challenge of accelerating climate change. While the need is significant, so are the potential financial, environmental, and community benefits.
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 performance indicators that allow for meaningful comparison across project/asset types and bond issuances. The Program advances multiple goals:
Enhances the Capacity of Issuers to:
- Cost-effectively quantify the environmental impacts of bond issuances;
- Compare planned approaches to maximize benefits; and
- Effectively communicate environmental impacts to stakeholders.
Empowers Investors and Underwriters to:
- Access verified environmental performance indicators from a trusted source;
- Elevate the consideration of environmental impact in decision making; and
- Monitor impact over time at the project, asset, and portfolio level.
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 key performance indicators (KPIs) using consistent and transparent approaches. The methodologies calculate environmental KPIs appropriate to the project/asset 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 methods and equations found in the methodologies and translate project‑ or asset-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/assets with their environmental KPIs,
- Impacts relative to established benchmarks, and
- Other related disclosure information.
Contact Us: We want to hear from you! ACR is actively engaging with U.S. municipal bond issuers to pilot our methods and guidance to ensure that they are effective and practical for use. If your organization is interested in joining us as a pilot partner or you just want to learn more, send an email to ACRCapitalMarkets@winrock.org.
If ACR has not yet published a methodology for a particular municipal project, asset, or activity type, ACR will consider methods developed by external authors for approval through our methodology proposal and development process. Interested parties can send an email to ACRCapitalMarkets@winrock.org.
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