CarbonCount™ Investment Tool Wins At BNEF Summit
The Alliance to Save Energy — a coalition of prominent business, government, environmental, and consumer leaders — has scored big at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit with CarbonCount™, an exciting new system for scoring the carbon impacts of green bonds. This revolutionary financial innovation has the potential to steer large quantities of capital toward climate-friendly investments.
The new tool from the Alliance gives investors additional confidence in their green decision-making. It will also help fuel significant growth in the green bond market by filtering out unproductive greenwash. Using a sophisticated marginal emissions model built by the US Environmental Protection Agency and data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the system can score bond investments by how much they truly reduce carbon emissions. It produces results in the form of annual tons of CO2 avoided per $1,000 of investment.
CarbonCount™’s consistent architecture enables the program to assemble project-level data typically required for standard investment underrating and then calculate an easily understood score. Project developers and bond issuers thus avoid the costly and time-consuming additional studies that have been standard practice in evaluating bond issues.
Every year, BNEF sponsors the prestigious Finance for Resilience (FiRe) competition at its Bloomberg New Energy Finance Future of Energy Summit in New York. This year, the gathering featured former US Vice President Al Gore and Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon. At the final session, a live audience selected CarbonCount™ for one of the four coveted FiRe prizes.
Said Kateri Callahan, veteran manager and president of the 30-year-old Alliance (a premier nongovernmental organization headquartered in Washington, DC), upon receiving the award:
“I am delighted that the finance community immediately recognized the importance of providing issuers and investors with a transparent and easy-to-understand metric that allows investors and issuers alike to compare the carbon impacts of differing investment opportunities. This win marks the start of an aggressive campaign by the Alliance to build market demand for CarbonCount™ through scoring any US-based green bond that is brought to us in 2015.”
The system is already up and running, scoring bonds in the marketplace today.
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