O Finance, where are you?
UN sustainable development goals took decades to develop
Getting a consensus to achieve global cooperation on any issue is challenging. It took several decades for the United Nations(UN) to get its members to adopt the 17 sustainable development goals(SDGs) in 2015. The process started years earlier with the Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro where 178 members agreed to an action plan to protect human lives and protect the planet. Eight years later, in September 2000, the UN adopted the Millenium Development Goals with the explicit goal to reduce extreme poverty by 2015.
Fifteen years later, in September 2015, the UN 2030 Agenda for sustainable development was adopted by the UN General Assembly. A few months earlier in July 2015, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda was formally launched by the UN. The plan stressed the importance of long-term investment and the need to align all financing with sustainable development.
No sense of urgency
During the 2008 financial crisis, almost 426 billion dollars were mobilised within two years to ‘save’ the US financial system. There is no sense of urgency to mobilise funds to implement the UN sustainable development goals. Yet the investments required are huge.
Recent OECD estimates indicate that around USD 6.9 trillion of infrastructure investment is needed each year to 2030 to meet the sustainable development goals and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The current annual spending on infrastructure is between USD 3.4–4.4 trillion, depending on the measurement metrics used. An investment gap of between 2.5 to 3.5 trillion dollars per year exists today.
There is clearly a large and significant investment gap to reach society’s desired sustainable development goals. The availability of capital does not seem to be the problem. According to the Financial Stability Board, global total financial assets stood at 382 trillion dollars as of 2017. Pension funds and insurance corporations’ assets were close to 65 trillion dollars. The core challenge is to incentivise the flow of a bigger share of this capital towards sustainable investments. To do this, strong leadership is a must.
EU leads the way
To address some of these issues, the European Union High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance produced a set of recommendations to accelerate the flow of capital towards sustainable development objectives. The European Commission(EC) adopted an action plan on sustainable finance in March 2018. Among the various actions, the Commission highlighted the limitations of existing sustainability benchmarks. Accordingly, it proposed an initiative to create a designated category of benchmarks comprising low-carbon issuers.
To prepare for the creation of these benchmarks, the European Commission had to clarify what exactly constitutes sustainable investments. In June 2019, the European Commission produced a taxonomy of sustainable investments. According to the European Union, the Taxonomy is an implementation tool that can enable capital markets to identify and respond to investment opportunities that contribute to environmental policy objectives. In October 2019, the European Union launched the International Platform on Sustainable Finance(IPSF) to strengthen international cooperation and scale up mobilisation of capital towards environmentally sustainable investments.
There is hope that the development of the EU Taxonomy, the new carbon benchmarks and the IPSF will enable the private sector to increase their capital allocation towards sustainable investments. The result could be substantially more funds to achieve the UN sustainable development goals. And Finance will finally show up.
