The market for green loans, sustainability-linked loans (SLLs) and social loans (collectively, ESG loans) is growing rapidly - but with that speed of growth, it can be hard to get a handle on the market trends. Requiring more than just "word-of-mouth" for these trends, we have developed an online platform which helps provide a more complete, and data-driven, picture of the market - our ESG Loans Insights Reports Hub.

Early in 2022, we started gathering and structuring key data on the ESG loans our Europe, Middle East and Asia offices have advised on, working closely with our innovation programme NRF Transform to develop this online platform to collect, store and analyse the data.

Our second ESG Loans Insights report is now live, with some interesting insights on the declassification event trigger, the rarity of Scope 3 emissions as a KPI, and popular KPIs in particular industry sectors.

One notable highlight is that the the vast majority (74%) of the KPIs in our data set are environmental, with the rest being social (19%) and governance (7%). There are a number of reasons for this, including the understandable emphasis given to climate change and the desire to align with the climate-related goals of the Paris Agreement. However, we are increasingly seeing social and governance KPIs included in SLLs, and expect this trend to continue as businesses focus on the broader concept of sustainability, not just environmental issues

As our data set continues to grow, we'll be able to see and share further and more in-depth insights over time - do keep an eye out.