CarbonCount™, the Alliance to Save Energy’s (Alliance) new system for scoring the carbon impacts of green bonds, has been named a winner of the prestigious Finance for Resilience (FiRe) competition held at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) Future of Energy Summit in New York.

Presenting to the final session of a gathering that featured former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon, Kateri Callahan, president of the Alliance, won the votes of a live audience who selected CarbonCount™ for the coveted FiRe prize, along with projects from three other organizations. This marked the end of a rigorous competition that began in January with a field of nearly 60 proposals, all seeking to demonstrate their “tangible” and “actionable” ability to unlock at least $1 billion of clean energy investment capital over three years. In the end, CarbonCount™ convinced both expert judges and the BNEF audience of its compelling potential to fulfill the FiRe goals.

CarbonCount™ is designed to serve as a confidence builder and “greenwash” avoider that can help fuel significant growth in the green bond market. It scores the reduction of carbon emissions of bond investments, leveraging a sophisticated marginal emissions model built by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to estimate annual tons of CO₂ avoided per $1,000 of investment. Using this consistent architecture, CarbonCount™ incorporates project-level data typically required for standard investment underwriting and then calculates an easy-to-understand score. Significantly, there is no need for costly and time consuming additional studies by the project developers or bond issuers. The system is already up and running, scoring bonds in the marketplace today.

“I am delighted that the finance community immediately recognized the importance of providing issuers and investors with a transparent and easy-to-understand metric that allows investors and issuers alike to compare the carbon impacts of differing investment opportunities,” said Kateri Callahan upon receiving the award. Callahan added, “This win marks the start of an aggressive campaign by the Alliance to build market demand for CarbonCount™ through scoring any U.S.-based green bond that is brought to us in 2015.”