A month ahead of the start of the UN Climate Summit (COP27), the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) recently launched a call to banks, corporations, and technology companies to participate in piloting a ground-breaking framework to grade the sustainability profile of individual trade transactions. In the first phase, only textile-specific standards have been approved. These pilots will be used to gauge industry experience in assessing transactions under the framework in practice, the results of which will feed into its future elaboration and extension to other industries.
Following an extensive global consultation exercise earlier this year on the initial recommendations set out in ICC’s white paper on ‘Standards for Sustainable Trade and Sustainable Trade Finance’, the organization, in partnership with Boston Consulting Group, has worked to define an initial framework capable of being piloted today in high-volume transaction environments.
The ‘wave one’ ICC Sustainable Trade Framework will work on the basis of a simple matrix to determine whether the different elements of a transaction are sustainable, drawing on readily available data and globally recognized sustainability standards. The businesses piloting the framework will be announced at a high-level event at COP27 in November. The full ‘wave one’ Sustainable Trade Framework will also be published then.
