The first action in the G-20 Sustainable Finance Roadmap proposes six high-level principles for the development and global coordination of approaches to align investments with sustainability goals. “Alignment approaches” are national and international frameworks for the financial sector that aim to monitor global sustainable finance flows and ensure that they are contributing to the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and other international sustainable finance objectives. These approaches increasingly leverage “alignment tools,” which include but are not limited to (a) taxonomies (or classifications) of private sector activities that can be labeled as achieving environmental and social objectives; (b) certifications and labels that confirm that products or services have met environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards; (c) disclosure frameworks that guide private sector entities to manage and report on their ESG performance; and (d) transition frameworks that help the private sector design a credible shift to low-carbon technologies and practices.
[2]