Ship finance is a $680bn book; sustainable shipping debt was about $3bn

Ship finance is a US$680bn book. Sustainable shipping debt last year was about $3bn.

The Global Maritime Forum's Climate Action in Shipping: 2026 Edition, citing Petrofin, puts the global ship finance portfolio at about $680bn at the end of 2025. Against that, shipping-specific sustainable debt issuance, covering instruments such as green loans and bonds, sustainability-linked loans and transition finance, came to about $3.0bn in 2025, down from $3.4bn in 2024.

A thin and concentrated market

The sustainable slice is not only small, it is concentrated. A single $1.1bn green loan, to Hapag-Lloyd, made up 37% of the 2025 total. Only about 10% of shipping's sustainable debt issuance was externally verified.

Put together, those figures describe a market where labeled finance is a tiny fraction of the overall book, where one deal can move the annual total, and where most of what is labeled sustainable has not been independently checked.

Capital follows what can be measured

Lenders, investors and their advisors need to know what a financed project actually delivered. Without measured, verified outcomes, a sustainability label is hard to price and hard to defend, and it is difficult for a lender to tell one loan apart from another.

The low share of externally verified issuance points to the same gap. The money exists in the ship finance book. What is missing is a reliable way to show the result.

A shared record

Verified reductions inside the value chain, recorded once as inset credits, give lenders, advisors and cargo owners a shared record of what a project delivered.

On Carbon3, a reduction is measured against a baseline, independently verified and then issued by the project developer as inset credits, each with a serial number linked to its project and verification data. A lender can see the verified outcome of a project it financed. A cargo owner that co-funded the change can see the reduction recorded against its own value chain. An advisor can trace either claim back to the same record.

Insetting is not offsetting: the credits represent reductions inside the value chain, not compensation from projects outside it.

Claim treatment depends on the applicable reporting framework.

Source: Global Maritime Forum, Climate Action in Shipping: 2026 Edition.