(Bloomberg) — An emerging ESG debt market that’s been embraced by bankers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. is about to see its pipeline get a meaningful boost, thanks to an agreement struck in Colombia.
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The market for so-called debt-for-nature swaps is set to benefit from a plan by six nonprofits to construct a shared pipeline of deals that will be shaped by common standards. The accord was announced on Tuesday at the United Nations biennial biodiversity summit, COP16, and signed by groups including The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and WWF. They say such swaps could unlock up to $100 billion in climate and nature finance.
“We are building not only the standards and practices, but the ability to go further, faster, together,” said Jennifer Morris, chief executive of The Nature Conservancy.
If done right, the swaps allow a country to refinance its debt on better terms and allocate part of the savings to environmental protection.
Recent deals include a $1 billion refinancing deal for El Salvador led by JPMorgan. In 2021, The Nature Conservancy and Credit Suisse constructed the first debt-for-nature swap to include private creditors, with a deal for Belize. The nonprofit has since helped push through transactions in Barbados and Gabon.
The coalition of nonprofits has already started to build a pipeline of potential projects, a spokesperson told Bloomberg.
Access to affordable capital for protecting biodiversity has emerged as key flash point at the COP16 talks, which started on Oct. 21 and run until Nov. 1. In 2022, almost 200 countries agreed to reverse nature loss by the end of the decade. So far, however, they’re nowhere near meeting their commitment to provide the hundreds of billions of dollars in financing needed to do so.
Delegates are working to define a finance strategy, but countries are clashing on the approach. Developing nations want more money and lower financing costs, as they grapple with the worsening fallout of extreme weather and bloated debt burdens.
The scale of the challenge surrounding sovereign debt conversions “requires radical collaboration,” the group of six nonprofits said in a statement. “Collaboration on debt conversion projects can lead to better outcomes for climate, conservation, and people.”
The coalition, which also includes the Pew Charitable Trusts and Re:wild, will develop common standards for structuring deals and a shared pipeline of new instruments. It will also work to expand the amount of public funds available to de-risk the deals in order to attract private investors at affordable rates for the borrower country.
Carter Roberts, chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund in the United States, described the coalition’s initiative as a “grappling hook” that’s being thrown “into market-based mechanisms and financial vehicles that will transform sovereign debt into funding for conservation.”
What BloombergNEF Says:
Meeting the goals of the Global Biodiversity Framework will require over $1 trillion of investment each year in the sectors that are most responsible for nature loss.
Click here for the full report by BNEF’s Alistair Purdie.
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