The forex market, once driven mainly by interest rates and GDP figures, has reached a turning point as it is now increasingly influenced by sustainability considerations. To this point, an estimated $30 trillion is currently held in assets aligned with ESG criteria globally, signalling a structural shift in how capital is allocated.
Therefore, countries demonstrating strong environmental policies and transparent governance are becoming more attractive to long-term foreign investors, especially with sustainability metrics beginning to play a growing role in shaping sovereign risk perception and capital confidence.
The European Central Bank (ECB), for instance, has already integrated climate considerations into its monetary policy, helping the Euro gain serious favor among ESG-focused institutional investors in the process. Moreover, nations like Norway have expanded their renewable energy capacity, including a 45 billion kroner investment in offshore wind projects, positioning its native currency as a beneficiary of the ongoing ESG capital inflows.
Exploring the evolution of sustainable trading infrastructure
Over the last couple of years traders are increasingly gaining access to sophisticated filtering systems that overlay sovereign ESG scores onto holistic technical and fundamental analysis frameworks.
Trade W, for example, offers traders access to 100 financial instruments through a mobile-first platform designed for the next generation of market participants. With more than five million active users across fifty regions and a monthly trading volume approaching sixty billion dollars, its native architecture reflects the broader industry movement toward reducing the carbon footprint associated with financial services.
That said, the quantitative evidence supporting ESG integration in forex has continued to strengthen in recent years as evidenced by the robust performance of sustainable funds that posted median returns of 12.5% over the first half of 2025 (across equities, bonds, and mixed assets) compared to 9.2% for their traditional counterparts.
Even ESG-enhanced instruments like green bonds have started representing an increasing portion of the global forex market, thus indirectly enabling traders to capitalize on ESG themes on daily timeframes. Similarly, ESG investing too is projected to reach $167.49 trillion by 2034 (from its current levels of $35.48 trillion), signalling that institutional rebalancing toward high-ESG jurisdictions will continue to reshape currency valuations in the near to mid term.
Problems still persist but nothing that can’t be tackled with ease
Despite these developments, unique challenges remain when it comes to ESG adoption in forex, especially given the short-term nature of many forex trades and how they conflict with the multi-year horizon over which ESG factors typically manifest. But the reality is messier and more interesting than that tension alone suggests.
Take Brazil’s real (BRL) for example. Between 2024 and 2025, even though deforestation fell by 11% yoy, hitting the lowest annual clearing rate since 2014 as President Lula’s environmental policies took hold. Yet the currency did not uniformly strengthen for the simple reason that forex markets priced in competing risks.
However, at the same time, currencies from genuinely high-ESG jurisdictions captured premium flows, with the Swiss franc (CHF) hitting a 14-year high against the US dollar in September, driven not by interest rates (which were at near zero) but by investor demand for ESG stability.
Similarly, New Zealand’s dollar (NZD) has been trading as a proxy for renewable energy credibility, backed by its well established Emissions Trading Scheme and carbon pricing mechanisms.
The data doesn’t lie
On the fund side of things, the outperformance spoke for itself with Tocqueville Dividende ISR posting returns of nearly 20% through Q1 2025, beating both the Morningstar Global TME Index and the MSCI ACWI Large Cap Index. Beyond individual funds, renewable energy-focused sustainable funds dominated the roost (particularly in May), with eight of these funds averaging 15.8% returns versus 4.2% for the broader sustainable fund universe.
Not only that, the tools to track this in real time are now accessible with remote sensing satellites providing imagery at a 1-meter resolution range, thus allowing traders to literally watch environmental policy enforcement or reversals as they happen.
In practical terms what this means is that a trader monitoring the World Bank’s Sovereign ESG Data Portal could have potentially identified New Zealand’s strengthening carbon policy implementation in Q2 2025 (tracking actual emissions reductions and regulatory data) and establish a long NZD position ahead of the subsequent institutional capital rotation.
Last but not least, for traders looking to build real positions, the infrastructure now exists with the Luxembourg Stock Exchange’s ESG bond database tracking over 20,000 sustainable instruments, updated continuously. These aren’t theoretical data troves. They’re live, updated daily, available to any trader willing to use.
Therefore, as these tools mature and become more accessible, retail traders have something institutional players have long protected jealously, i.e. the ability to trade on real-time ESG shifts before they fully price into markets. In simple terms, the barrier isn’t data anymore. It’s knowing where to look!
This article was written by IL Contributors at investinglive.com.