The winners have been announced for the 2022 Environmental Finance Bond Awards, which celebrate the leading green, social, sustainability and sustainability-linked (GSSS) bond and loan deals in 2021 and recognise significant market participants.
The 2022 awards attracted more than 350 entries across 66 updated categories, including the new Sovereign sustainability bond of the year category and updates to existing categories.
The diversity of the winners revealed 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 Indonesia to Belize, Chile to South Africa, and Mexico to Japan.
The most frequent winner in the 2022 awards was HSBC, which picked up six of the 18 lead manager awards on offer this year. BNP Paribas and JP Morgan, however, also collected a bumper crop of lead manager awards – with three each.
On the issuer side, NatWest secured awards for both its green and social bond issuance in 2021. Meanwhile, Belize was awarded two prizes for its ground-breaking 'blue' bond.
Ulf Erlandsson – chief executive at the think tank Anthropocene Fixed Income Institute – secured the Personality of the year award following his initiation of a novel form of "professional activism" which has challenged financial firms to ensure all of their financing supports their climate commitments.
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 Thomas Cox, Michael Hurley, Madeleine Jenkins, Ahren Lester, Genevieve Redgrave and Joe Walsh.
"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-working in reviewing the hundreds of entries," said Ahren Lester, assistant editor of Environmental Finance.
"After another record-breaking year for the market, we can only look forward to watching the work continuing in 2022 – laying the groundwork for the future award winners in 2023."
Many of the winners will be speaking at Environmental Finance's ESG in Fixed Income EMEA 2022 conference, which will be held in-person on 28 April 2022 in London. See details here.
People:Ulf Erlandsson