The Mongolian Sustainable Finance Association. The  Association is responsible for operationalising the eight sustainable finance principles and providing tools and guidance as well as building capacity for the principles to be acted upon in the financial sector. This has included the production of four sector guidelines to identify, assess and manage environmental and social risks (ESR) within these sectors. The sectors are Construction, Mining, Agricultural and Manufacturing. These sectors were targeted because they have associated risks of higher negative environmental and social risks. These sectors are also more regulated, providing an existing compliance framework to build these ESR guidelines from. A fifth sector guideline is currently being produced for the textile sector.

The Guidelines include an ESR checklist for assessing and managing risk and compliance for new investment/ loan activities under consideration by the commercial banks. While the checklist highlights areas of potential negative social and environmental impact, a challenge each of the banks face was in implementing the checklist, including working out what data to collect against various metrics, and how to verify these data.

The seminar with the ILO provided an opportunity to:

• understand green jobs and just transition – so how managing environmental risk can and does impact on the labour market – with both positive and negative impacts;
• highlight how other changes to production and consumption systems to address environmental sustainability such as circular economy, are impacting on financial institutions and the types of products they offer;
• through a discussion on labour standards, including for child labour and forced labour, develop solutions to better operationalise the ESR checklist and guidelines.