The winners have been announced for the 2024 Environmental Finance Sustainable Debt Awards, formerly known as the Environmental Finance Bond Awards.
The awards celebrate the leading green, social, sustainability and sustainability-linked (GSSS) bond and loan deals in 2023 and recognise significant market participants.
Now in its ninth year, the 2024 awards attracted close to 450 entries across more than 80 updated categories, including new categories that recognise innovation in both loan structure and loan use of proceeds, a Green loan of the year award and a Social loan of the year award.
The Sustainability-linked bond of the year and Sustainability-linked loan of the year awards have also both been broken down into sub-categories, covering corporates, financial institutions, sovereign, supranational and agency (SSAs)/sub-sovereigns, and others.
The diversity of the winners reveals the impressive reach that the GSSS bond market has achieved in recent years. As well as from Europe and North America, winners were drawn from East Africa to Japan, and Uruguay to Brazil.
The most frequent winner in the 2024 awards was HSBC, which picked up four of the 19 lead manager awards on offer. BNP Paribas, Bank of America Securities (BofA) and Citi, also collected a crop of lead manager awards – with three each.
Irina Likhachova, International Finance Corporation's (IFC) global biodiversity finance lead won the award for Personality of the year, for her thought leadership and contributions developing the first-ever biodiversity investment guidance in the market.
The awards were reviewed by an independent panel of judges from the investment community, with the full winners list now available here.
The award winner write-ups were put together by Joe Walsh, Michael Hurley, Annabelle Palmer, Ahren Lester, Genevieve Redgrave and Jennifer Forrest.
"The award winners provide a wonderful snapshot of the spectacular innovation and activity occurring in the sustainable finance market today, and Environmental Finance is delighted to congratulate all the winners for their success – and thank the judges for their hard work in reviewing the hundreds of entries," said Annabelle Palmer, content strategist of Environmental Finance.
"2023 saw a rebounding in activity for the sustainable debt market and that is reflected in the expanding number of categories that have been added to this awards series. We look forward to watching how the market continues to evolve and innovate in 2024 – laying the groundwork for the future award winners."
The rebranding of the awards matches the rebranding of the 2023 ESG in Fixed Income Global Conference Series to the 2024 Sustainable Debt Global Conference Series, taking place in London, Singapore and New York, with a similar expansion of coverage to include a greater focus on sustainable loans markets.
Many of the winners will be speaking at Environmental Finance's Sustainable Debt EMEA Conference which will be held in-person on 16 April 2024 in London.
Companies:Environmental Finance