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ICC issues a positioning paper for Standards for Sustainable Trade & Sustainable Trade Finance as a roadmap and vision for industry, policymakers and traders worldwide

10/11/2021

While a number of related standards for sustainable goods and services and financial products exist, none are readily adapted to robustly define and demarcate sustainable trade. 

In light of that, the ICC established a programme in September 2021 to begin defining and setting the standards for sustainable trade in a manner that is practical, comprehensive, and provides sufficient transparency into the sustainability of a transaction. 

Bringing together stakeholders from the ICC, numerous trade banks, corporates, infrastructural players, and Boston Consulting Group, the programme sets out to achieve the following: 

·       Define sustainable trade and trade finance; 

·       Establish a framework to measure and assess the sustainability of a given trade transaction/trade finance portfolio to meet the standards for sustainable trade; and 

·       Engage with the broader trade community to iterate and refine these over time. 

The ambition for the first sprint of this programme has been to establish first principles thinking on the above, and prepare a high-level positioning paper for further industry engagement. In the longer-term, we expect these to shape widely adopted ICC definitions and standards that work to increase the sustainability of global trade. 

The positioning paper can be obtained here


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