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Luxembourg Stock Exchange (LuxSE)’s leading platform for sustainable finance, the Luxembourg Green Exchange (LGX), has announced it hit its largest milestone to date, counting €1 trillion worth of outstanding green, social, sustainability and sustainability-linked (GSSS) bonds on the platform.
Laetitia Hamon, from LuxSE, noted that LGX was launched in 2016 and from the world’s first platform dedicated exclusively to green bonds, it started to offer a range of sustainable debt instruments before it became a “reference venue” for sustainable finance education, data and assistance services.
On 31 January 2024, the LGX platform served 310+ issuers from 60 countries, which together have issued more than 1,900 Green, Social, Sustainability and Sustainability-linked (GSSS) bonds in 41 currencies. The LGX community of issuers include international institutions such as the European Union, multilateral development banks, financial institutions and corporates across a range of different sectors.
From when the world’s first green bond was issued in 2007, it took twelve years to reach $1 trillion of cumulative GSSS issuance, Laetitia Hamon explained. Then, the pace of issuance increased exponentially, especially in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2021 saw $1 trillion worth of GSSS bonds being issued globally in a single year.
2020 and 2021 also proved to be pivotal years in the evolution of LGX as it transformed its scope beyond a platform dedicated to sustainable securities. The year 2020 saw the launch of the LGX Academy and LGX DataHub. Since then, the LGX Academy’s expert lecturers have brought sustainable finance education and actionable case studies to hundreds of participants hailing from countries across Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia.
The lead-up to this €1 trillion milestone has also been marked by many developments aiming to reorient sustainable capital flows towards where they are needed the most – in emerging markets and within the realm of gender equality and women’s empowerment. In recent years, in addition to providing sustainable finance training and capacity building to market participants operating in these regions, LuxSE has entered into several strategic partnerships with exchanges in Chile, India, Rwanda, Cape Verde as well as the Western Africa regional exchange, among others. Through these partnerships, numerous GSSS bonds have been brought to international investors via LGX, including a bond focusing on the blue economy issued by Cape Verde-based international investment bank (iib), and the first gender bond from Sub-Saharan Africa issued by Tanzania-based NMB bank.
Laetitia Hamon concluded that, while innovation and rapid market developments have helped pave the way during the nearly eight years since LuxSE established LGX, the mission to mobilise investment for sustainable development and help drive concrete progress towards the Paris Agreement and UN SDGs remained the same.
