European green bond issuance rebounded sharply in the first half of 2026, following a significant market slowdown that primarily occurred across 2022 and 2023 when global fixed-income markets were heavily disrupted by aggressive interest rate hikes and increasing material costs. The Financial Times reports $242 billion of EU green-bond issuance under the EuGB standard in the first half of 2026, putting Europe on track to account for almost two-thirds of the new global green debt this year, compared to around 55% in 2025.
By contrast, US green debt issuance totaled just $34 billion in the first half of 2026, and it is expected to decline further for a second consecutive year. The Financial Times attributes that decline to US political pressure, which has resulted in an ongoing wave of anti-ESG legislation. This has encouraged many US corporations to avoid labeling their debt as “green” in order to protect their state-level business interests and avoid being pulled into the political crosshairs. Other companies have instead decided to quietly execute their environmental capital expenditures without publicly labeling their bonds as “green”, a practice recently dubbed “greenhushing.”
Back across the Atlantic, European corporations have been taking a very different approach. Utility companies have been especially active, as energy security rises up the agenda amid continuing geopolitical disruptions. For example, the Financial Times reports €1.5 billion in green bonds from Spanish electricity provider Iberdrola and €2.75 billion from French utility giant EDF. Throughout the bloc, decarbonization and energy resilience are increasingly overlapping financing priorities.
Meanwhile, ING expects green bonds and green loans to account for roughly 60% of sustainable debt issuance in 2026, compared to 50% in 2024 and 40% in 2021. Sustainability-linked bond and loan issuance, on the other hand, has fallen by 54% year over year in the first half of 2026, indicating that capital is increasingly favoring instruments where proceeds are tied to specified green uses rather than more flexible sustainability-linked structures that can be difficult to track and verify.
Also noteworthy is the fact that tougher regulatory standards have not prevented issuers from accessing demand. As the EuGB framework enjoys continued momentum, German energy company Eurogrid raised €500 million through its second EuGB this August, attracting an order book above €4.2 billion. Broader EuGB issuance in 2026 is already reported to be approximately 50% greater than the entirety of 2025.
The continuing success of the EuGB framework presents several important opportunities to financial institutions and fintechs operating in the bloc, especially when it comes to areas like underwriting, structuring, verification, reporting, and sustainable project finance. However, regional divergence still means that global institutions cannot assume a single ESG-finance market dynamic across Europe and the US—not least because greenhushing makes labeled issuance an imperfect measure of underlying investment activity.
ING expects sustainable debt issuance to remain relatively strong throughout the rest of the year, albeit with major differences between regions, issuer types, and product categories. Nonetheless, Europe currently has by far the highest momentum, especially when it comes to green use-of-proceeds instruments and public sector financing. Ultimately, Europe is setting the pace for labeled debt around the world.