The Principles for Taxonomy Interoperability, developed by partners in the Taxonomy Roadmap Initiative, are intended to help countries and regulators design and implement key policy tools—sustainable finance taxonomies—with a set of guiding tenets to ensure that these taxonomies are usable, credible and comparable across borders.


Sustainable finance taxonomies are powerful tools for both emerging and developed markets. By providing definitions, transparency and consistency around what can be considered “green” or “sustainable” to meet environmental and social goals, taxonomies enable the financial sector, policymakers, regulators and other stakeholders to share common understandings of which economic activities are contributing to these goals. This, in turn, can help build investors’ confidence, which helps channel and monitor capital towards projects with positive environmental and social impacts.


However, with more than 50 national and regional taxonomies around the world, banks and investors face challenges in determining how to evaluate, compare and effectively use these taxonomies in their decision-making. While a local taxonomy is an essential building block for market growth, to enable the cross-border flow of capital, taxonomies need to be “interoperable”—able to be compared based on common principles and/or a scientific baseline.


The Principles, launched by partners in the Taxonomy Roadmap Initiative* at a Pre-COP30 event in São Paulo, provide guidance to aid sustainable finance taxonomy developers and policymakers in creating, governing and implementing taxonomies, with the aim of supporting financial and non-financial companies in effectively using these taxonomies in their decision-making about environmentally and socially sustainable projects to finance and advance.


Greater implementation of interoperable taxonomies worldwide has the potential to accelerate mobilization of the trillions of dollars in climate finance needed globally to decarbonize, build capacity for climate resilience and adaptation, and meet Paris Agreement targets. Achieving interoperability requires global collaboration with input from emerging and developed market contexts. It is a collective pursuit of a global objective in line with the COP30 Presidency’s call for collaboration as well as leadership from the Global South.


 


Download the Principles for Taxonomy Interoperability



 


About the Taxonomy Roadmap Initiative


* The Taxonomy Roadmap Initiative is known in full as the Roadmap for Advancing Interoperability and Comparability of Sustainable Finance Taxonomies. It was launched at COP29 in response to the global need for interoperability. It is a voluntary initiative with global partners aiming to collectively make technical progress on taxonomies and interoperability. Partners in the initiative are Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBAR), International Finance Corporation (IFC), Sustainable Banking and Finance Network (SBFN), International Platform on Sustainable Finance (IPSF), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH (technical support), UNEP FI, Climate Bonds Initiative (Climate Bonds), the EU Sustainable Finance Advisory Hub, Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and the Ministry of Finance of Brazil.