Sustainable Debt Americas 2025 conference round-up

Live from New York: Another hugely successful Environmental Finance event in the Americas highlights the growing importance of innovation and creativity in sustainable debt markets in the region. Ahren Lester reports

Environmental Finance’s long-standing Sustainable Debt conference has spent more than a decade providing an opportunity to discuss the pressing current and future themes for the market, and the 2025 Americas event once again provided a vibrant forum to tackle these challenges and opportunities.

Of course, the 2025 event occurred at a curious point in time for the sustainable debt market – especially in the Americas.

According to Environmental Finance Data, labelled sustainable debt – including both bonds and loans – hit a new annual record of nearly $2 trillion during 2024. A record-breaking $960 billion from sustainable loans was accompanied by the second largest annual total of $1.06 trillion from sustainable bonds – the latter being the fourth consecutive years of around $1 trillion issuance.

2025 is looking less and less likely to extend this remarkable run, however. Sustainable debt markets have faced intensifying social, economic and political scrutiny over the last 12 months – not least in the US where the event took place.

In the first six months of 2025, sustainable bond volumes were down 21% and sustainable loans down 19%, compared with the year prior. In the Americas, the contraction is even more striking. Sustainable bond issuance was down 43% in 2025 to date, whilst sustainable loan volumes were 29% lower.

To drop a bit of an understatement, this is clearly disappointing for anyone who has been working for years towards driving rather than depleting the flow of funds to sustainable projects. 

But what was striking throughout the discussions with attendees both during the sessions and in the networking breaks was the strength of the optimism and – equally importantly – the dynamism within the market.   

Indeed, perhaps even more so here in the Americas, we are seeing an active desire to find innovative and creative structures and approaches in the debt market outside of the labelled markets in order to negotiate the current challenging environment.

Globally, there is an appreciation that we need to look beyond ‘pure’ green projects if we are to achieve our mutual sustainability goals. Debates around transition finance, ‘green enabling’ projects, and supporting the decarbonisation of critical hard-to-abate sectors

“Green has always been a spectrum,” Axa Investment Managers sustainability analyst Jamison Friedland said. “That has always been ... how we think about this.”

“You have a spectrum of green even within subcategories. Take green building certifications, there are a wide range of credibility of that certification. And certain asset managers will have different thresholds of what they deem as an acceptable certification threshold.”

Fundamentally, however, it is up to asset owners about how the investment community – and issuers – approach this topic.

“Are we going to have just traditional green or are we going to have transition funds? Are we going to have decarbonisation strategies, and what will be allowed in those different strategies? This will really be influenced by what our clients want.”

From an instrument perspective, meanwhile, we were treated to some invaluable insights into the formulation and future of some of the current wave of innovations.

The Climate Investment Funds (CIF) explained how its novel $500 million CIF Capital Market Mechanism (CCMM) bond in January enable the institution to accelerate is important clean technology financing in emerging markets. A sign that investors are still looking for impactful investment opportunities.

“This is a real vote of confidence from investors, who saw CCMM as an opportunity to participate in the transformation of energy systems in emerging economies,” CIF deputy chief executive Matthieu Pegon said.

“This means more funds available for scaling-up clean technology in developing countries – not in ten years, but now, when it’s most needed. CCMM is a powerful example of innovation and partnership in climate finance.”

We were also provided with fascinating insights into the growing issuance and investment appeal of debt-for-nature swaps. This offered a great opportunity to unpack these novel and impactful structures after a milestone couple of years which has seen record issuance in 2024 – including from the Bahamas, Barbados, Ecuador and El Salvador – and industry guidance published.

‘Blue bonds’ have also continued to cross new milestones in recent years – including important launches of dedicated sustainable bond funds. In 2025, blue bond issuance has also been active with recent deals from issuers including Latin American development bank CAF as well as Gulf lender First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), Thai water firm East Water, and UK 'super sewer' developer Tideway.

As the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and T Rowe Price – who launched their own ground-breaking, dedicated blue bond fund – told the event, blue bonds are at a “tipping point”.

“Blue bonds are an inflection point today which is similar to where green bonds were 10 to 15 years ago,” T Rowe Price impact fixed income head Matthew Lawton told attendees. “And from an investor perspective, that is actually really exciting.”

And the opportunities that greater discussion – and guidance – that blue bonds have had in recent years has really helped. As a result, T Rowe Price estimates that around $2.5 billion worth of blue bonds are in the pipeline over the next 18 months.

Another theme that continued to garner a lot of interest and debate was around climate resilience and adaptation. This critical yet underappreciated sustainable finance topic has received a significant increase in attention over the last 12 months – including a ground-breaking Climate Bonds Resilience Taxonomy (CBRT) from the influential Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) and a ‘sourcebook’ for climate resilience-focused investor stewardship.

Despite this, there is still a lot of work to do to help support this area – especially to overcome ongoing tensions in the market about what constitutes climate adaptation finance.

“Adaptation is in the eye of the beholder, and what the private sector means by adaptation is not necessarily what public sector means by adaptation,” IMF Monetary and Capital Markets Department climate and sustainable finance advisor Ekaterina Gratcheva said.

“You can quite often have conversations where people talk using the same terminology, only at the end of the conversation to realise that they talking past each other and there is no convergence,” Gratcheva said. “We have seen some potential [climate adaptation] deals been undone, just because public sector and private sector or an investment bank and an asset owner cannot come to an agreement on what adaptation even means – let alone on the impacts from adaptation.”

Looking forward to our Sustainable Debt Americas 2026, it is abundantly clear that – for good and ill – the Americas will remain in global focus from a sustainable finance perspective.

New York Climate Week taking place in the city next week will provide an interesting barometer for perceptions around the current state and future of sustainable finance in the largest economy in the world and its regional neighbours. At the start of the year, Environmental Finance heard a lot of caution about attendance and just how “core” the event would be this year.

This malaise was not on display in New York this week at the Environmental Finance event – a point repeatedly and positively commented upon throughout the day. Indeed, it was abundantly clear that sustainable finance progress has not been derailed but rather detoured by the current environment.

Meanwhile, at the UN COP30 climate summit taking place in Brazil in November, Latin America has the opportunity to take the lead on key emerging sustainable finance themes – not least nature finance.

And there was hope that the annual UN climate event can help move action forward. Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) climate finance manager Shravan Bhat said he hoped COP30 would create some impetus to “connect the dots” between the high-level Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and something more granular at asset level.

Meanwhile, Ninety One emerging market fixed income portfolio manager Matt Christ hoped the event would “underscore the commercial opportunities” on offer to markets from sustainability investment.

For sustainable debt markets, all eyes will be on the Americas and what 2026 holds for capital flows. The region is critical both from a volume and vibrancy perspective for the market. Fortunately, the Environmental Finance Sustainable Debt Americas 2025 event really drove home that, whilst volumes may be slipping, the creativity and innovation in the Americas is soaring.

Right now, this innovation may be in response to these short-term challenges. But the more direct, dynamic and undogmatic approach this is requiring offers sustainable debt markets a potential long-term growth opportunity – not just in the Americas, but globally.    

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