ESG Data Guide 2024

ICE - ICE UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Data – Municipal Bonds

Data category

  • Environmental data
  • Rankings
  • Social data

The data offers solutions for:

  • Environmental impact analysis and insight
  • Investment decisions and portfolio insight
  • Nature-based information
  • Nature-based information: Land use
  • Nature-based information: Water
  • Reporting: UN SDGs
  • Social impact analysis and insight

Who are the data users?

  • Financial institutions
  • Investors

Brief description of the data offering

To support customers who want to leverage the UN SDG framework to assist with sustainable investment strategies for municipal bonds ICE offers an SDG data set.

By combining our geospatial modelling technology with municipal capital markets expertise, ICE can tap into multiple sources of publicly available data to create metrics to help clients in their investment decision making. The resulting ICE data items are directly mapped to 45 UN SDG defined targets, which can be used for peer comparison of issuers or issues on a like-for-like basis to assess progress over time to meeting 15 high-level goals.

Key features 

  • CUSIP level metrics 
  • Percentile rankings  
  • Historical data  
  • Data file and user interface 
  • Use of proceeds Reported boundaries or drive times 

Use cases

  • Trend analysis – use history to track improvement (or deterioration) over time 
  • Portfolio construction – enable a variety of impact investing strategies and test them using historical data Security selection – provide data needed to avoid or seek out specific profiles 
  • Reporting – aggregate data at the portfolio/fund level for investor facing statistics

Where and how do you source your data?

SDG Taxonomy Dataset relies on a broad array of data sources that are curated, cleansed, and normalized, then spatially mapped to US issuers and instruments, providing a quantitative framework that supports a variety of ESG investment objectives. Data for each feature is collected at the highest spatial resolution possible. Possible resolutions include census tracts, counties, states, municipalities, charter schools, and institutions for higher education. Most data is sourced from government websites, including but not limited to the U.S. Census Bureau, Department of Education, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Center for Disease Control.

What is the cost for your data offering?

Please contact https://www.ice.com/data-services/sustainable-finance-data#ef.

What are the key attributes that differentiate the data you offer?

  • Integration into a combined User Interface (UI) and file-based
  • File based delivery (Apex) at the security level which allows for security level (CUSIP) query capabilities
  • Breadth of coverage across municipal obligors in the contiguous 48 U.S. states
  • Common social metrics to easily compare all multiple categories of common social impact and sustainability investing goals
  • Clients can download visuals from the UI and seamlessly generate custom reports, PowerPoint presentations or pdf documents  
  • UI functionality allows clients to view underlying community demographic & socioeconomic data for selected obligors and surrounding area
  • User-tailorable definition of service areas and outputs to enable in-depth analysis of complex revenue-based obligors and issuers e.g. hospitals, charter schools, transit
  • Customized query capabilities, and saving of user-defined searches and templates
  • Both current values, and historical values are available back to 2012, and can be used as an input for index construction, backtesting, and other simulation-based investment tools.