Sustainability-Linked Finance
After the world’s first SDG-Linked Bonds issued in 2019, Enel then expanded the range of its Sustainability-Linked Financing instruments in 2020 with SDG-Linked Loans and Revolving Credit Facilities; it also started the Target Guaranteed Euro-Commercial Paper Program as part of the Sustainable Development Goal 7 on Affordable and Clean Energy (SDG 7), showcasing how sustainability can be integrated across the financing tools of the company.
Enel wishes to foster best market practices and present a unified and coherent suite of Sustainability-Linked Financing instruments to the market and to the subsidized and development financing space. Enel has thus decided to establish a Sustainability-Linked Financing Framework.
Though Enel’s instruments under this framework will be mainly focused on contributing to SDG 7 and SDG 13, Enel believes it is important for the development of the market to name this framework “Sustainability-Linked Framework,” hence adopting a name aligned to the principles established in the loan and, more recently, in the bond markets.
In December 2022, Enel’s commitment to fight against climate change achieved a new historic milestone as its comprehensive decarbonization roadmap was certified by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) as consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, hence aligned to the most ambitious temperature goal of the Paris Agreement adopted by the United Nations in 2015. In February 2023, Enel updated its Sustainability-Linked Financing Framework, introducing, for the first time, a brand new set of KPIs linked to the EU Taxonomy and to the Scope 3 emissions reduction. As part of the update and the innovation brought to the market, Enel added therefore the following KPIs: “Scope 1 and 3 GHG emissions Intensity relating to Integrated Power”, “Absolute Scope 3 GHG emissions relating to Gas Retail” and “Proportion of CAPEX aligned to the EU Taxonomy”.