Trinidad and To­ba­go now has a for­mal frame­work for is­su­ing green and oth­er la­belled bonds, cre­at­ing an­oth­er fi­nanc­ing op­tion for cli­mate and de­vel­op­ment projects.

The Guide­lines for the Is­suance of Green, So­cial, Sus­tain­abil­i­ty, and Sus­tain­abil­i­ty-Linked (GSS+) In­stru­ments in T&T were launched on Sep­tem­ber 8, at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain.

They were de­vel­oped joint­ly by IDB In­vest and the Trinidad and To­ba­go Stock Ex­change Ltd (TTSE), with the Cli­mate Bonds Ini­tia­tive serv­ing as con­sul­tant.

“T&T has al­ready shown that la­belled fi­nance can work. The next step is to turn pi­o­neer­ing trans­ac­tions in­to a cred­i­ble and con­sis­tent mar­ket,” said An­drés Fe­lipe Sánchez, glob­al head of Re­gion­al Overview at Cli­mate Bonds.

T&T al­ready has ex­pe­ri­ence with la­belled bonds. Home Mort­gage Bank is­sued a $300 mil­lion so­cial bond in No­vem­ber 2022, the first the­mat­ic bond in T&T and the Caribbean. The T&T Mort­gage Bank Lim­it­ed fol­lowed with an­oth­er so­cial bond in 2025.

Cli­mate Bonds puts the com­bined val­ue of lo­cal-cur­ren­cy so­cial bond trans­ac­tions since 2022 at $550 mil­lion, or about US$81 mil­lion.

The guide­lines al­so state that T&T’s ex­ist­ing leg­isla­tive frame­work al­lows GSS+ in­stru­ments to be struc­tured and is­sued with­out new reg­u­la­tion. That find­ing fol­lowed con­sul­ta­tions be­tween March and June 2026 with reg­u­la­tors, gov­ern­ment min­istries, bro­kers, is­suers, banks and in­vestors.

Da­ta from the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank’s Green Bond Trans­paren­cy Plat­form shows how green-bond pro­ceeds have been used across Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean.

Be­tween Sep­tem­ber 2015 and De­cem­ber 2025, is­suers re­port­ed US$8.93 bil­lion in dis­burse­ments across five en­er­gy cat­e­gories, cov­er­ing 88 bonds and 346 projects in 12 coun­tries.

En­er­gy ac­count­ed for 52 per cent of re­port­ed green-bond dis­burse­ments in the plat­form’s dataset.

Wind and trans­mis­sion to­geth­er rep­re­sent­ed 71.8 per cent of en­er­gy-re­lat­ed spend­ing.

Trans­mis­sion ranked sec­ond, ahead of so­lar. This could be­come in­creas­ing­ly rel­e­vant as T&T adds more re­new­able gen­er­a­tion to the elec­tric­i­ty sys­tem.

The dataset al­so records no dis­burse­ments for grid-scale or be­hind-the-me­tre en­er­gy stor­age projects. En­er­gy stor­age is an el­i­gi­ble cat­e­go­ry un­der the IC­MA Green Bond Prin­ci­ples ref­er­enced in the lo­cal guide­lines.

T&T’s Na­tion­al Cli­mate Change Pol­i­cy sets an ob­jec­tive of three per cent re­new­able en­er­gy pro­duc­tion on the grid by 2030. The coun­try’s Na­tion­al­ly De­ter­mined Con­tri­bu­tion al­so tar­gets low­er trans­port emis­sions.

The GSS+ guide­lines iden­ti­fy pos­si­ble in­vest­ment ar­eas in­clud­ing re­new­able pow­er gen­er­a­tion, green hy­dro­gen, elec­tric ve­hi­cle in­fra­struc­ture, en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy and in­dus­tri­al de­car­bon­i­sa­tion.

Tran­si­tion fi­nance may al­so be rel­e­vant to T&T’s am­mo­nia and methanol in­dus­tries. The guide­lines iden­ti­fy ba­sic chem­i­cals and hy­dro­gen among the hard-to-abate sec­tors where tran­si­tion-la­belled in­stru­ments can be used to fi­nance emis­sions re­duc­tions.

An ear­li­er NDC Im­ple­men­ta­tion Plan es­ti­mat­ed in­vest­ment needs at US$2 bil­lion, in­clud­ing US$1 bil­lion for pow­er gen­er­a­tion, US$700 mil­lion for trans­port and US$300 mil­lion for in­dus­try.

For com­par­i­son, the US$1 bil­lion iden­ti­fied for pow­er gen­er­a­tion is about one-quar­ter of the US$4.08 bil­lion that is­suers in the re­gion­al dataset re­port­ed dis­burs­ing to wind projects be­tween 2015 and 2025.

The guide­lines cov­er the main stages of is­su­ing la­belled in­stru­ments, in­clud­ing project el­i­gi­bil­i­ty, ex­ter­nal re­view, re­port­ing and post-is­suance ver­i­fi­ca­tion.

Stake­hold­ers con­sult­ed dur­ing their prepa­ra­tion al­so raised pos­si­ble tax in­cen­tives for GSS+ is­suers and sov­er­eign la­belled is­suance as op­tions for de­vel­op­ing the mar­ket.

Cli­mate Bonds es­ti­mates that cu­mu­la­tive GSS+ is­suance orig­i­nat­ing from Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean reached be­tween US$250 bil­lion and US$300 bil­lion by 2025.

T&T now has a frame­work for ac­cess­ing more of that mar­ket. The next step is for pub­lic and pri­vate is­suers to bring suit­able projects for­ward.