Frameworks
The agreements, taxonomies, and disclosure standards that set the rules for climate finance.
Thirteen frameworks. One question: who writes the rules?
- 01 Paris AgreementFoundational The treaty that made climate a financial obligation, not just an environmental aspiration.
- 02 Article 6 The section of the Paris Agreement that governs international carbon markets, determining whether countries can use traded emissions reductions to meet their climate targets, and on what terms.
- 03 CSRD The EU law that made comprehensive sustainability reporting mandatory for large companies and introduced the principle that companies must account for both how climate affects them and how they affect climate.
- 04 EU Green Deal The European Union's overarching strategy to become the world's first climate-neutral continent by 2050. A sweeping legislative and investment programme that reshaped global green finance.
- 05 EU Taxonomy The European Union's official classification system that defines which economic activities count as environmentally sustainable. It is the legal backbone of green finance in Europe.
- 06 GHG Protocol The internationally recognised standard for measuring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions. The accounting bedrock that underpins nearly every corporate climate target, disclosure framework, and carbon market in existence.
- 07 Green Bond Principles The voluntary market guidelines published by ICMA that define how a bond qualifies as 'green', the foundational standard governing the world's largest sustainable debt market.
- 08 IFRS S1 and S2 The global baseline standards for sustainability and climate-related financial disclosure, published in 2023 by the ISSB, the body that inherited and formalised TCFD's legacy.
- 09 Inflation Reduction Act The largest climate investment in US history, a 2022 law that deployed nearly $400 billion in federal incentives to accelerate clean energy and reshape the economics of the US energy transition.
- 10 Kyoto Protocol The world's first legally binding climate treaty, a landmark that proved carbon markets could work at scale, but showed the limits of a system that asked only wealthy nations to act.
- 11 Montreal Protocol The 1987 international treaty to phase out ozone-depleting substances, widely regarded as the most successful environmental treaty in history, and an increasingly relevant model for climate action.
- 12 SFDR The EU law that requires asset managers and financial product providers to classify and disclose how sustainable their products actually are, designed to cut through greenwashing in investment markets.
- 13 TCFD The framework that made climate risk a mainstream concern in global finance, and the template for almost every disclosure standard that followed.