An overview of the distributional impact of global warming shows that the negative externalities of carbon-intensive development models are already significant in Africa. The most compelling reasons for promoting green investments in Africa is the direct economic returns in terms of savings and employment opportunities. Most renewable energy jobs created over the last few years have occurred outside Africa possibly another missed opportunity after the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution. Carbon-free technologies must not be used to sustain income inequality and macroeconomic imbalances between industrialized and developing countries, but to uniformly boost green investments.
This report looks at fiduciary duty across eight markets (US, Canada, UK, Germany, Brazil, Australia, Japan and South Africa) through a series of events, interviews, case studies and a legal review. It finds that fiduciary duties have played, and continue to play, a critical role in ensuring that fiduciaries are loyal to their beneficiaries and carry out their duties in a prudent manner. It concludes that fiduciary duty is not an obstacle to asset owner action on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors and it recommends that all of the players in the investment process take specific actions in order for ESG to be implemented on a truly global scale in order to move towards a sustainable financial and economic system.
The green bond market - bonds whose proceeds are used for green projects, most commonly climate mitigation and adaptation projects - is growing rapidly, with outstanding issuance at US$66bn in June 2015. This growth needs to be accelerated to keep pace with the climate challenge.
This briefing paper offers a range of options for building green bond markets which ultimately will help policymakers, regulators and public financial institutions meet their infrastructure investment needs, capital market development aims, and targets for climate action and environmental protection. This paper is the first result of a partnership between the Climate Bonds Initiative, UNEP Inquiry and the World Bank Group that will produce a guide to practical options for policy makers to scale up green bond markets for sustainable development.
In South-East Asia a number of stakeholders are seeking to leverage green growth strategies, to reach macroeconomic and societal goals, and engage in profitable business. Through experience however, many actors have encountered numerous obstacles and challenges in financing projects, executing transactions and facilitating climate finance flows.
Focusing on financial policy and regulatory developments in Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia and Malaysia, this reports explores the different barriers that exist to private climate finance flows in the region. It concludes that capital is hindered from moving towards low-carbon infrastructure because of a number of policy and regulatory barriers, including a lack of policy consistency and alignment, potential liquidity issues in the banking sector, and structural barriers to climate finance innovation in financial markets.
In 2014, the UNEP Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) and the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL, working with and on behalf of the Banking Environment Initiative – BEI) commissioned a study entitled, “Stability and Sustainability in Banking Reform – Are Environmental Risks Missing in Basel III?”. The resulting report pointed to the material links between financial stability and environmental (and social) risks.
Since then, bilateral engagements with a number of banking regulators have taken place. In addition, an Expert Dialogue between the worlds of Science and Finance was convened jointly by UNEP FI, CISL and the UNEP Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System (‘the UNEP Inquiry’) in April 2015, with a view to refining a common understanding of the stability-sustainability link and to exploring how this link might be addressed going forward.
This briefing provides a synthesis of the current state of thinking on the topic, based on the work above. It is intended as a means of sharing key findings with policy-makers and of engaging them on the matter.
Raw materials are essential for the global economy and future development depends on their continued supply. In general, their deposits in the Earth’s crust are also geographically clustered, making security of supply a potential risk. In many cases, the exhaustion of economically competitive minerals deposits in industrialized countries has made supplies increasingly dependent on the political stability of mineral-rich emerging economies. At the same time, increasing demand from these emerging markets, new technologies that require large amounts of rare minerals , low substitutability in applications and low rates of recycling have made economies more vulnerable to potential supply disruptions.