The Climate Bonds Initiative Defined Resilience. Now Comes the Hard Part.

Sustainable investment taxonomies are supposed to unlock capital. That, at least, is the aim.

When the Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) launched the Climate Bonds Resilience Taxonomy (CBRT) two years ago, interest in using capital markets to fund climate-resilient investments was running hot. Labeled bond volumes were on their way to topping US$6trn in 2024, and there was a groundswell of support for harnessing fixed income to close the adaptation finance gap.

What the market wanted was a ‘how-to guide’ to defining and packaging resilience investments. The CBRT obliged with a sprawling classification system underpinned by a scientifically robust methodology. As the then Director of Strategy and Programs at the CBI told Climate Proof in September 2024, its purpose was to mobilize torrents of institutional capital for resilience, “helping to protect society, communities, and the most vulnerable from a warming world.”

Twenty-four months on, that torrent is more of a trickle. Just two issuers have brought bonds to market that reference the framework directly. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government became the world’s first issuer to win CBRT certification in 2025 with a €300mn (US$336mn) bond, and returned this month with a €400mn (US$448mn) follow-up. CAF, the Latin American development bank, unveiled a US$100mn resilience bond aligned with the taxonomy — but not certified by CBI — at COP30 last November. Other adaptation-themed bonds, such as Garanti BBVA’s US$30mn issue in June, did not draw on the CBRT.

Yet bond counts tell only part of the story. Interviews with bankers, advisers, and CBI staff paint a more complicated picture: a framework that has reshaped how governments and investors think about resilience, even as it struggles to become something a treasury desk can actually use.

“We’d love the taxonomy to be used more widely across bond issuance, and we’d love to see more resilience bonds in the market. But what we’ve seen is that the taxonomy is actually quite a good guide for other stakeholders who are not issuing bonds,” says Meggie Eloy, Global Technical Assistance Lead at CBI.