To build its Ecoscoring tool – intended as an assessment tool to help the Rail Community accessing sustainable finance– UIC is inviting its Members to get together in order to discuss the tool’s environmental, societal and governance KPIs, related to the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the corresponding calculation methodologies at a workshop to be held between early April 2020 and end of May 2020 in UIC Headquarters
In January 2019, at the initiative of UIC Chairman and the endorsement of the UIC General Management, UIC kicked-off the Ecoscoring project. Aimed not only at easing access to sustainable finance and green bonds but mainly also at defining a rating system and a supportive tool based on the Sustainable Development Goals, Ecoscoring will help railways in positioning themselves as green and low carbon transport modes by rating their environmental, societal and governance performances. In this framework, UIC has been working in synergy with CER to provide inputs to the EU taxonomy as sustainable finance is high on the EU agenda.
After a kick-off meeting held on 12 November 2019, UIC and a group of interested and motivated members have decided to work on the Ecoscoring tool. The idea was to develop a tool to allow each railway operating company or infrastructure manager to assess their environmental, societal, governance performance against the targets of the sustainable development tools developed by the UN, on a voluntary basis and tailored to the needs of the sector.
The team started the screening of the SDGs and shortlisted a series of targets and their corresponding indicators that constituted in their opinion a common ground on which all railway stakeholders would agree. Also, it as greed that an appropriate weighting will have to be applied to each indicator to ensure the scoring’s accuracy and legitimacy.
Entering now its development phase, the Ecoscoring Tool is expected to be delivered at end November 2020 for the UIC general Assembly of December 2020.
However, to reach a UIC-wide consensus, the list of indicators to be used to generate the scorings now needs to be submitted to and approved by, a larger and more representative panel of UIC members and railway stakeholders.
A technical discussion will therefore take place at a one-day face-to-face meeting to be held between early April and end of May 2020 at UIC Headquarters.
This will be the opportunity for you to become familiar with the underlying principles of UIC Ecoscoring tool, which is also intrinsically aimed at identifying and advising on opportunities for improvements for rail stakeholders, at company (and possibly also at project) level. This event will allow you to have a say in the selection of KPIs in order to tailor the tool to measure to the current needs of the railway sector.
