Örebro: Green bonds and impact reporting

Örebro Municipality was the second municipality in Sweden to issue a green bond. In 2014, the city launched its first Green Bond Framework along with the issuance of their first green bond.

The framework is developed and formulated according to ICMA´s Green Bond Principles 2018. It is the intention of Örebro Municipality to follow best practices in the market as the standards develop.

Örebro Municipality also recognizes the importance of impact reporting and they are one of the initiators of the Nordic Public Sector Issuers: Joint Position Paper on Green Bonds Impact Reporting. They have contributed actively in this initiative, aiming to advance and progress impact reporting. The first edition of the Position Paper was published in October 2017, available at www.orebro.se.

Örebro Municipality’s Green Bond Framework

The Position Paper on Green Bonds Impact Reporting, originally launched in October 2017 by a group of ten Nordic public sector issuers, was published in an updated version in 2019.

Developed with the primary aim of assisting Nordic public sector borrowers, the signatories hope that it will prove useful also for issuers from the private sector and from other countries as well as for the investor community.

– What characterises Nordic public sector issuers of green bonds is that we finance projects across a range of categories and sizes, and that we have a limited number of people available to work with environmental reporting. These guidelines make our reporting efforts easier, while at the same time hopefully making the different reports more harmonised and comparable to the reader, says Torunn Brånå, Head of Green Finance at Norway’s Kommunalbanken and chairperson of the cooperation’s technical/environmental working group.

The paper has been developed by a group comprising public sector green bond issuers from the four Nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. They include the local government funding agencies Kommunalbanken (Norway), Kommuninvest (Sweden) and MuniFin (Finland); the Swedish Export Credit Corporation (SEK); and seven Swedish municipal or regional issuers including City of Gothenburg, the municipalities of Lund, Norrköping, Västerås and Örebro, Region Skåne and Region Stockholm.

With initiatives such as the EU Sustainable Finance Action Plan making headlines recently, the Nordic issuers expect even stronger interest in green bonds impact reporting. The group aims to contribute to develop the methodology in this field.

– Through this harmonisation initiative, we ensure transparency and consistency in reporting from the Nordic public sector green bond market. Developing sound and harmonised methodology for climate finance reporting is of importance to all stakeholders in the market, says Antti Kontio, Head of Funding and Corporate Responsibility at Municipality Finance and the Finnish spokesperson for the cooperation.