Adif joins the green bond market to protect the environment
Adif Alta Velocidad, a state owned public corporation responsible for the construction and management of Spain’s highspeed rail network, successfully launched a 600 million euro green bond this year.
The transaction demonstrates the company’s commitment to clean transportation and energy efficiency as well as its efforts to contribute to protect the environment and improve socioeconomic well-being.
ADIF AV launched its first green bond in 2017 and has decided to repeat this year. “We want to do more because climate change is an increasingly more tangible reality and we can only fight it if we are more ambitious. It must be a collective effort”, in words of the company.
The company will allocate the proceeds of the transaction to investments related to new rail lines and rail lines extensions. ADIF-AV will also promote sustainable transport investing in the maintenance, upgrades and energy efficiency of the rail system. The eligible green projects will include new and ongoing ones with disbursements up to 2 years prior to the notes issuance and up to 24 months from the launch of the issue.
ADIF AV develops its activity of design, construction and maintenance of the rail system seeking to minimize the environmental impact derived from these activities. The company’s objective is to achieve the maximum degree of environmental integration of the new rail lines. The Strategic Plan of the company is based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) approved by the United Nations in 2015, with which ADIF AV is completely committed.
ADIF AV has a concrete sustainability goal, contained in the Master Plan for Energy Savings and Efficiency 2014-2020, of reducing their energy consumption by 106.81 GWh equiv per year by 2020 relative to energy in 2008. Protecting the environment is one of its fundamental commitments and values.
The issuance of this second green bond will allow the company to strengthen its environmental commitment as it will attract billions of passengers coming from other means of transport that are more contaminant than the railway. ADIF calculates that the proceeds of the first 600 million green bond it issued in 2017 would avoid 550.000 tons of CO2 a year by favoring railway transportation.
Societe Generale played an important role in this successful bond issuance for Adif and acted as joint bookrunner of the operation.