The origins of Environmental Finance Data

Environmental Finance was established in 1999 to report on sustainable investment, green finance and the people and companies active in environmental markets.

Environmental Finance has covered the sustainable bond market since its inception in 2007 and in 2015 Environmental Finance Data (formerly Environmental Finance Bond Database) was created as a centralised hub for all sustainable debt information.

The sustainable bond market continues to grow at an astounding rate, with almost 19,000 bonds issued and over $3.9trn outstanding by the end of 2023.

The database has grown from an ad-hoc spreadsheet kept by journalists to track the sustainable bond market development into a full-time team maintaining and improving the interactive portal it is today.

Database coverage

The database covers all sustainable bond issued since 2007 and boasts 95%+ market coverage. Originally just covering green bonds, the database has evolved with the market and now tracks social, sustainability, transition, and sustainability-linked bonds.

The database is updated daily with new transactions, resources and information and is reconciled on a quarterly basis to ensure maximum accuracy (see methodology page for details).

Environmental Finance Data is a live database, reacting to changes and evolution of the sustainable bond market by regularly adding new datapoints and functionality.

Green and sustainability-linked loans

In 2020 the database expanded to provide coverage of the green and sustainability-linked loan markets. The bi-lateral, private nature of many loan transactions creates an opacity in the loan market and consequently it is challenging to accurate gauge the database coverage of sustainable loans. We endeavour to track the publicly reported sustainable loan deals in as much detail as possible.

Citing Environmental Finance Data

Suggested citation: Environmental Finance Data (efdata.org)

Functionality

Homepage

The database homepage offers market insights at a glance with tables of the latest bonds and loans, lead manager league tables and charts of key market metrics such as value, currency and issuance volume.

Bond, loan, issuer, lead manager pages

The database is split into separate pages for bonds, loans, issuers, and lead managers.

The issuer and lead manager pages provide tables of issuers and lead managers which can be ranked, grouped, filtered, and searched.

The bond and loan pages provide an exhaustive list of sustainable bonds and loans issued since 2007 which can be filtered by a number of criteria to create custom lists and results. The filters include:

  • Settlement date

  • Bond label (green/social/sustainability/transition/sustainability-linked)

  • Bond sub label

  • Bond asset class

  • Loan instrument type

  • Bond standards (including ICMA's green bond principles (GBP), social bond principles (SBP), sustainability-linked principles and many others)

  • Maturity date

  • Issuer type (corporate, sovereign, municipal, agency, supranational)

  • Issuer sector

  • Issuer country

  • Issuer region

  • Identifier (ISIN or CUSIP)

  • Private placement

  • Rating agency

  • Stock exchange

  • Currency

  • Use of proceeds (Green, social, sustainability and transition bonds can be searched by specific use of proceeds)

  • KPI category (Sustainability-linked bonds can be searched by the category of their KPI)

  • KPI details (step up, observation date, verifier and frequency)

  • United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs)

  • CBI certified (if the bond has been certified by the Climate Bonds Initiative)

In-depth bond, loan, issuer, and lead manager pages

The summary tables of bonds, loans, issuers, and lead managers are all interactive and each bond, loan, issuer, and lead manager has an individual summary page. The bond and loan pages provide in-depth information on each transaction as well as all bond/loan and issuer/borrower resources and documentation.

The issuer/borrower and lead manager/lender pages offer a summary of all transaction the organisation has been involved in, with all related documentation and resources and interactive charts.

Export

The entire database, or a custom bond search, can be exported as an excel file for further analysis and filtering. The export function is customisable, and each export can select the data points for inclusion. The customisable data columns for export include:

  • Bond asset class

  • Loan instrument type

  • Bond/issuer resources (whether a bond or issuer has certain key documents e.g., final terms)

  • Issuer resources (whether an issuer has certain key documents e.g. framework, impact report)

  • Country

  • Country code

  • Coupon

  • Coupon frequency

  • Currency

  • Currency name

  • ISIN/CUSIP

  • Exchange rate

  • KPI category (sustainability-linked bond KPIs)

  • KPI details (step up, observation date, verifier and frequency)

  • Use of proceeds (green, social, sustainability or transition bond use of proceeds)

  • Issuer sector

  • Issuer type

  • Lead manager

  • Law firm

  • Notes (additional text boxes of relevant information on bonds or loans)

  • Rating, UN SDG

  • Bond Standard

  • Stock exchange

  • Tenor

  • CBI certified

  • SBTi (if the issuer has targets aligned with science based targets initiative)

Data feed

Export is also available via an API to automatically feed data directly into internal databases.

Resource library

The resource library is a searchable and filterable library of bond, loan, issuer and lead manager resources and documents. There are 17 different resource types including:

  • Bond final terms

  • Press releases

  • Investor presentations

  • Sustainable frameworks

  • Impact reports

  • Sustainability reports

  • Assurances

  • Second Party Opinions

  • External reviews

  • Handbooks, Guides and papers

The resource library can be searched by specific organisation (issuer, borrower, lead manager, lender) and filtered by organisation sector, country, region and publish date.

News and analysis

Environmental Finance is one of the leading publications and media providers in the industry and publish an annual Sustainable Bond Insight flagship report which provides an annual summary of the sustainable bond market and expert examination of the state and direction of the industry.

The database incorporates Environmental Finance's award-winning journalism and news reporting, with related news articles linked on bond, loan, issuer, and lead manager pages.