Five Years of Advancing the G20 Sustainable Finance Roadmap

By 2021, the global sustainable finance landscape had grown fragmented and become difficult to navigate. Investors could not compare bonds across markets, and countries had built taxonomies in isolation, creating incomparable standards. Financial institutions navigated multiple competing frameworks, facing difficulties in distinguishing credible climate-aligned activities from those raising concerns about greenwashing. 

The adoption of the G20 Sustainable Finance Roadmap (‘Roadmap’) represented a significant milestone in an environment where countries faced distinct national circumstances and pursued diverse priorities. It resulted from a shared understanding that this complexity was slowing progress. The Roadmap sought to offer a reference for jurisdictions, international organizations, alliances, and market actors to identify common areas of work, and set out credible actions. The problems the Roadmap aimed to address— interoperability of sustainable-investment alignment frameworks, credibility in transition planning, limited capacity across markets, and rising sustainability-related risks— required sustained, coordinated action and could not be addressed through one-off interventions. 

In the past five years, the Roadmap implementation has made steady progress. Forty-nine knowledge partners have contributed directly to the G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group (SFWG) process through a series of technical analyses, translating the Roadmap’s priorities into practical frameworks and tools. Based on these analyses and extensive consultation processes, annual reports, four of which endorsed at the G20 Leaders level, have built consensus around key recommendations. These include alignment principles which informed taxonomies in Brazil, Panama and the Dominican Republic; transition finance frameworks which guided credible net-zero planning and have inspired further development, for example the International Transition Plan Network (ITPN); new capacity-building coalitions (e.g., CASI, GCBC); and resilience principles now shaping corporate disclosures. Together, they form a complimentary group of tools and frameworks that responds directly to the gaps, opportunities and coordination needs identified when the Roadmap was first drafted.

Turning ambition into action

In its inaugural year under Italy’s Presidency in 2021, the G20 SFWG worked, among others, towards enabling coordination among jurisdictions to bring consistency on alignment approaches. It addressed one of the Roadmap’s focus areas: the proliferation of sustainable finance definitions and frameworks. The resulting G20 Principles for Developing Alignment Approaches provided a common resource for jurisdictions shaping taxonomies and other alignment tools, helping reduce fragmentation and improve transparency around what constitutes sustainable or transitioning activities. The principles informed the Common Framework of Sustainable Finance Taxonomies for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) – which Brazil, Panama and the Dominican Republic adopted as the foundation or their national taxonomies. It demonstrated how G20 coordination could drive regional interoperability at scale. 

Under Indonesia’s Presidency in 2022, the Transition Finance Framework (TFF) expanded the scope of work: how do high-emitting sectors credibly transition without stranded assets? The framework provided guidance on credible transition plans, transition-aligned financing instruments and sectoral pathways reflected Roadmap emphasis on forward-looking strategies that are reliable and comparable across markets. The TFF offers financial institutions, corporates and policymakers a practical reference for evaluating credibility of transition commitments and aligning capital flows with credible decarbonization pathways. 

Strengthening the foundations for implementation

The Roadmap also identified capacity constraints as a major barrier to implementation – without technical expertise and institutional frameworks, even willing jurisdictions could not operationalize taxonomies or assess transition plan credibility. Under India’s presidency in 2023, a comprehensive assessment of sustainable finance capacity requirements and available support among G20 members and international organizations led to the development of the Technical Assistance Action Plan (TAAP). It aims to address the need for coherent support across providers and led to the birth of two major global capacity building coalitions – Capacity Building Alliance of Sustainable Investments (CASI) and Global Capacity Building Coalitions (GCBC), helping countries strengthen institutional and technical capacity. The creation of these coalitions demonstrates how the Roadmap has not only shaped the content of sustainable finance work, but also the infrastructure needed to deliver it at scale across diverse markets.

Every year, all permanent G20 jurisdictions voluntarily reported their domestic work against the Roadmap focus areas. This voluntary reporting highlighted gaps and allowed G20 SFWG to prioritize underserved areas. Under Brazil’s Presidency in 2024, this process identified social considerations as a critical gap in transition planning: coal phase-outs displace workers, renewable energy transitions reshape regional economies, and climate policies create distributional impacts that risk public backlash and implementation failure. The High Level Principles on Just Transition Plans brought social considerations into the center of transition finance discussions. These principles support meaningful engagement with workers and communities, encourage fair and inclusive transition strategies, and highlight the importance of addressing distributional impacts. Their development reflects the Roadmap’s intent to broaden the scope of sustainable finance beyond climate alone, ensuring transitions are credible both economically and socially.

Integrating resilience and climate-risk realities

Under the South Africa’s Presidency in 2025, the High Level Principles for Integrating Adaptation & Resilience into Transition Plans & Disclosures addressed an important gap: the need to incorporate physical climate risks and resilience measures into forward-looking planning. Transition plans focused overwhelmingly on emissions reduction while ignoring that changing weather patterns and sea-level rise threatens coastal infrastructure, disrupt agricultural supply chains, and impact labor productivity and asset values. These principles help jurisdictions and firms to integrate climate impacts and resilience measures into forward-looking planning, ensuring transition pathways account for the physical realities companies and communities will face. 

Beyond direct deliverables, the Roadmap catalyzed broader international initiatives. In 2021, the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), building on the Roadmap focus on disclosure, started to develop a disclosure framework for nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities. Over five years, 733 organizations adopted TNFD recommendations, covering USD 22 trillion in assets under management. In November 2025, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) announced it would develop standards for nature-related risks and opportunities, drawing on the TNFD framework. It demonstrates how the G20 can trigger foundational work leading to changes in private sector finance practices. 

Why continued progress matters

There is still more to be done. The rate of climate change affected populations rose by 75%, with an average of 124 million people impacted each year. This reflects growing vulnerability and exposure. Yet many jurisdictions still face deep capacity, data, and institutional gaps, hindering the progress of sustainable finance. Now, more than ever, we need to recognize the value of sustained, coordinated work under a shared framework.

Over the past five years, leveraging the G20 SFWG convening power, foundational work and agreements, the Roadmap has helped translate broad priorities into practical guidance, strengthened global coherence through shared frameworks and supported jurisdictions in building a more credible, transparent and effective sustainable finance systems. Its model of annual voluntary reporting, gap-driven priority setting, and sequenced technical deliverables demonstrates how multilateral coordination can address complex, evolving challenges.

As sustainable finance continues to grow, this foundation will remain essential for supporting jurisdictions, improving market practices and shaping the next steps in global cooperation.