About WaterFundable PBC

We chose these frameworks because they are the ones utilities, investors, regulators, and corporate sustainability teams already use and trust. When a utility CFO presents our financing structure to their board, they see familiar standards. When an ESG analyst evaluates our bonds, they see recognized certification. When a corporate sustainability team reports their water stewardship impact, they see auditable attribution tied to a verified protocol. That interoperability is not an accident. It is the design.

The American Water Works Association publishes a guide called the Water Utility Capital Financing Manual that explains the options water utilities have today for paying for big projects, and where those options fall short. The Environmental Protection Agency has documented why federal funding alone cannot cover what is needed and why private investors need to be part of the solution. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has studied how to combine public money, philanthropic money, and private investment into a single structure that makes water projects less risky and cheaper to finance. WaterFundable builds on all three of these bodies of work.

Our bonds are issued under a federal rule called Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 144A. This rule allows bonds to be sold privately to large, sophisticated institutional investors called Qualified Institutional Buyers without going through the full public registration process that the Securities and Exchange Commission normally requires. To qualify as a Qualified Institutional Buyer, an investor must manage at least one hundred million dollars in securities on a discretionary basis. Our licensed broker dealer partner handles all the verification and ongoing compliance that this rule requires. The initial offering is structured under Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933, which provides the legal foundation for the private placement before the bonds are made available to Qualified Institutional Buyers.

The International Capital Market Association (icmagroup.org) publishes the Green Bond Principles and Blue Bond guidance that govern how bond proceeds are used, how projects are selected, and how results are reported to investors. The Climate Bonds Initiative (climatebonds.net) certifies bonds that meet its water infrastructure criteria, giving institutional investors a trusted label for making water-related investment decisions. The Government Finance Officers Association (gfoa.org) provides guidance for public utilities on how to participate in green bond programs and what their boards and bond attorneys need to see before approving that participation.

The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (tnfd.global) sets the rules for how companies and investors measure and report the risks and opportunities connected to nature, including freshwater ecosystems. CDP (cdp.net) is the global platform through which thousands of companies publicly report their water use, water risks, and water commitments to investors and supply chain partners. WaterFundable generates verified data on how each project in our portfolios performs and maps that data directly to what our corporate partners need to complete their CDP water reports and meet their global sustainability commitments. We do the measurement. They get the credit.

The CEO Water Mandate, run through the United Nations Global Compact and the Water Resilience Coalition (waterresiliencecoalition.org), sets the standard for what it means for a company to make a serious, verifiable commitment to water. The World Resources Institute (wri.org) developed a measurement method called Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting that lets companies calculate exactly how much water a project saves or restores in a specific place. The Alliance for Water Stewardship (a4ws.org) sets the certification standard we use to evaluate which corporate partners are eligible to contribute to our portfolios and how we track what their money actually accomplished.