(Bloomberg) -- Sustainability chiefs on Wall Street expect borrowers to continue to tap the booming global debt market to fund their sustainability goals, even during Donald Trump’s less ESG-friendly administration.
The US has huge infrastructure needs and those needs are only getting bigger, said Amy West, global head of ESG solutions at TD Securities. This means state and local governments, whether blue or red, will seek financing to make sure their infrastructure is less susceptible to extreme weather events, she said, speaking Wednesday at a conference hosted by Bloomberg Intelligence.
West expects some federal support, but anticipates it will be far less than in previous years.
“It’s a little too soon to say if the Republican sweep of Congress will directly impact this market,” but the increase in municipal issuance will almost certainly continue in the months ahead, West said. And that includes the sale of environmental, social and governance debt in the muni market, she said.
Corporations, which have historically preferred to be apolitical, are changing the way they communicate their sustainability policies because of the recent ESG pushback in the US, West said. Instead of ESG, companies have been referring to sustainability. Still, she said the private sector will want climate financing.
“All eyes in the next four years are going to be on the private sector and on the ambition that’s expected by capital providers, regardless of what this administration does,” she said.
Global issuance of green bonds, the largest category of sustainable debt by volume, has surged this year with sales poised to break the annual record. Meanwhile, ESG tags that don’t require proceeds to be used for specific projects have struggled as greenwashing concerns mount, impacting the sustainability-linked bond and transition bond markets.
Asset managers that treat sustainable investing as a marketing opportunity and not as a financial investment thesis are partly to blame, according to Stephen Liberatore, head of fixed-income ESG and impact investing strategies at Nuveen.
“That’s where we have to get back to,” he said at the conference. “Making this about investment returns and showing that sustainability, again, if done correctly, is profitable, especially from the investor perspective.”
Japan is diverging from the rest of the world by embracing transition bonds. Issuance of the debt has stalled overseas, with investors reluctant to put their money in bonds that typically don’t finance specific environmental projects like green notes do.
“This obsession with trying to define things perfectly for different frameworks is just an absolute waste of time,” said Aniket Shah, global head of sustainability and transition strategy at Jefferies Group LLC. “You’re missing the world that is getting built right in front of you because instead we’re spending all of our time trying to define things as transition or not, or green or not, or social or not.”
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.