From SpainNAB, we attended the institutional event dedicated to sustainable finance as a lever for the ecological transition— a high-level gathering that brought together representatives from government, supervisory authorities, the financial sector, and key stakeholders in sustainable investment in Spain and the European Union.
The event highlighted both the progress made in mobilising capital towards sustainability and the remaining challenges in directing financing towards the sectors, projects, and territories that are essential for a fair and effective transition.
A favourable context, but with structural challenges
The opening of the event, delivered by Sara Aagesen Muñoz, Third Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, highlighted the need to align public policy, competitiveness, and sustainability. In the same line, Carla Díaz Álvarez de Toledo, Director General of the Treasury, emphasized the role of sustainable finance as a strategic element to strengthen the competitiveness of Spain’s productive fabric.
One of the key milestones of the event was the presentation of the report “Sustainable Finance in Spain: Situation, Needs and Key Drivers for the Transition,” prepared by our associate EY and presented by Alberto Castila and Mario Delgado. The study offers a preliminary but highly valuable overview: there is a significant volume of mobilised resources and a clear appetite for financing, although with notable differences depending on sectors, project types, and financial structures.
Current Landscape of Sustainable Finance in Spain
The report identifies a wide variety of financial instruments and actors:
- Bank loans, mainly long-term, strengthened by dedicated sustainability liaison offices that provide technical support.
- Investment funds, particularly equity funds, with greater flexibility in objectives and an estimated volume exceeding €150 billion.
- Public financing, with an increasingly diverse range of instruments and a key role as a catalyst for private capital.
- The insurance sector, with a relevant countercyclical role.
By sector, energy, mobility, and buildings account for more than 70% of investment needs, while climate adaptation-related sectors are gaining increasing relevance. The report also highlights the strategic role of enabling sectors, which are essential for strategic autonomy and tend to deliver more visible returns in the medium and long term.
Sector challenges and the need for new financial solutions
One of the main conclusions of the analysis is that financing challenges vary significantly depending on the sector, the nature of the project, and execution capacity. In particular, large-scale projects tend to progress through the gradual transformation of production models, while others—such as those focused on efficiency, compliance, or nature—require more complex solutions, including blended finance schemes and impact-oriented approaches.
Among the report’s recommendations are:
- Increasing the financial attractiveness of projects with high social returns, for example through public guarantees.
- Strengthening the project pipeline, with sector-specific transition pathways that allow for the anticipation of costs and risks and the activation of levers across the value chain.
- Making good practices more visible and widespread, facilitating their replicability.
Financing gaps from the market’s perspective
The roundtable, moderated by Marta Olavarría, Director of Regulation and Sustainability at Corporance, allowed for the report’s analysis to be contrasted with the direct experience of investors and financial institutions.
From Spainsif, Pablo Esteban highlighted the predominance of fixed income, especially green bonds, with a strong weight of taxonomy-aligned projects, mainly renewables and energy efficiency, in a context marked by energy uncertainty. In equities, investment is expanding into sectors such as water, health and well-being, biodiversity, nature-based solutions and new technologies, as well as social and affordable housing, which is still highly specialized.
COFIDES, represented by its Sustainability Director Rafael Matos, noted that large renewable energy and energy efficiency projects remain the most easily financeable, while areas such as the circular economy, materials, waste, or sustainable housing—at the intersection of social and environmental impact—face greater barriers.
Soledad Hurtado de Mendoza, from BNP Paribas Asset Management, highlighted the growing investor appetite for environmental solutions and strategic autonomy, with a key role played by sustainable bonds (which already account for around 15% of issuances in EMEA). However, she also stressed the importance of data traceability, long-term corporate commitment, and the identification of profitable and scalable sectors.
For her part, Clara González, representing the Bank of Spain, recalled that around two-thirds of climate finance is channelled through debt, mainly bank lending, and that the lack of information and data remains an obstacle, particularly in climate adaptation—which receives only around 5–7% of financial flows—as well as in projects related to biodiversity.
Underserved sectors and lines of action
Among the clearly underfunded areas identified were:
- Clean technologies that are difficult to scale (such as green hydrogen, energy storage, and carbon capture), affected by technological and regulatory risk.
- Transition infrastructure that requires clear public–private frameworks.
- Projects with uncertain cash flows or long-term returns, such as coastal adaptation, sustainable tourism, or biodiversity-related initiatives.
- Highly fragmented sectors such as regenerative agriculture, the blue economy, or building renovation, where the small scale of individual projects makes access to financing more difficult.
The proposals point to strengthening public guarantees, better structuring the participation of institutional investors, advancing contracts for difference, developing public securitisable programmes, and fostering long-term oriented financial innovation, with public investment acting as an anchor.
European perspective and closing remarks
The second part of the event provided a European perspective, with the presentation of the report “Monitoring Capital Flows Towards Sustainable Finance in the EU” and a dialogue led by Helena Viñes, Chair of the EU Platform on Sustainable Finance and Member of the CNMV, on the evolution and trends of decarbonisation financing in the EU. The discussion highlighted the need for regulatory coherence, comparable data, and a long-term vision.
The event was closed by Carlos San Basilio, President of the CNMV, who reaffirmed the supervisor’s commitment to developing financial markets that support a sustainable, credible, and data-driven transition.
SpainNAB’s vision: putting impact at the centre
The debate on sustainable finance reflects significant progress in mobilising capital, but it also highlights a recurring limitation: social impact is still often secondary, especially in projects and territories where financial returns are less immediate or risks are higher.
It is precisely in this space where impact investing brings distinctive value, by intentionally directing capital towards measurable social and environmental impact, particularly where other forms of sustainable finance do not always reach. At SpainNAB, we work to make these gaps visible, strengthen the pipeline of impact projects, and promote financial frameworks that integrate patient capital, public-private collaboration, and robust impact metrics, with the aim of advancing an ecological transition that is also socially fair and inclusive.
