By Vanora Bennett

The EBRD’s Green Trade Facilitation Programme (Green TFP) has won the Sustainable Trade Finance Award at the 2022 TFG International Trade Awards, in cooperation with BAFT, which recognises outstanding contributions to global trade and finance.

The awards are organised by Trade Finance Global, a leading trade finance publication, and members of the Bankers Association for Finance and Trade (BAFT), the leading global association for international transaction banking. Winners of the sixth year of the competition were announced yesterday at the BAFT 2022 Global Annual Meeting in Washington DC, US.

EBRD First Vice President Jürgen Rigterink said: “We are very proud of this recognition for our pioneering Green TFP, which uses the well-established mechanisms of trade finance to help supply goods and technologies needed in addressing climate change. The upheavals of the global pandemic and the war on Ukraine make it more important still not to ignore the continuous need to support transition to a green economy and to support sustainable trade.”

Deepesh Patel, Editorial Director at TFG said: “The need to avert the risks of climate change has never been more urgent than it is today, making the sustainability category for this year’s trade finance awards particularly important. Congratulations to EBRD for a well-deserved award and a big thank you for continuing to push for the transition to a green economy”

The EBRD’s Green TFP allows partner banks under the EBRD’s Trade Facilitation Programme (TFP) to use their existing TFP facilities for the financing of exports, imports and the local distribution of imported green technologies and materials, in line with the Bank’s Green Economy Transition (GET) approach. The GET expertise provided by EBRD energy efficiency and climate change experts has been instrumental in the development of Green TFP.

Since 2016, Green TFP has supported almost 1,300 foreign trade transactions involving trade in higher performance technologies and sustainably sourced materials with a total volume of €1,335 million across 26 economies where the EBRD invests. These resulted in annual energy savings of 6,068 GWh, water savings of 1,699,110 m3 and emission reductions of 3,099 kilotonnes, CO2 equivalent.

Green TFP transactions to date include the import of wind power generation equipment from Denmark to Ukraine, the import of small-scale combined heat and power technologies from Italy to Lebanon, the import of water-saving bottling lines from Germany to Armenia and from France to Tunisia, the import of residential lifts from Greece to Kosovo and the export of sustainably sourced wood products from Romania to Egypt.

The EBRD’s Trade Facilitation Programme, launched in 1999, aims to promote foreign trade to, from and among the economies where the EBRD invests. Through the programme, the EBRD provides guarantees to international confirming banks and short-term loans to selected local banks and factoring companies for on-lending to local exporters, importers and distributors.

The EBRD’s TFP currently includes 124 local banks in 28 economies where the EBRD invests, with limits exceeding €5 billion(US$5.3billion) in total and more than 800 confirming banks worldwide.