Bonds and Climate Change 2017: The State of the Market Canada marks the sixth annual stocktake of green bonds and green finance in Canada, produced in partnership with the Climate Bonds Initiative.
The State of the Market Canada edition results from a longstanding joint partnership between the two organisations and is a special supplement to the flagship Bonds and Climate Change: The State of the Market global report.
The Canada edition marks specific highlights from the current year, emerging trends, and identifies specific opportunities for green bond market development.
This guide has been developed in response to the interest of developing markets in the potential for capital markets to connect institutional private capital with projects that deliver positive environmental impact. Green bonds are a vehicle for doing this. The guide has been written for those with responsibility and interest in achieving environmental goals and commitments, in particular green growth and infrastructure development. It may be particularly useful for environment, finance and planning ministries and related teams in regions and cities.
The guide draws on learning from CDKN’s project to assess the potential for a successful green bond market in Colombia, and its broader climate finance work in other developing and emerging markets.
The market for green bonds has risen from USD 3 billion in 2011 to USD 95 billion in issuance in 2016. For policy makers, the report proposes a framework for understanding potential directions of bond market evolution, increased convergence of rules and definitions, and quantitative analysis of the potential contribution that bond markets can make to a low-carbon transition.
This report describes the development of the green bond market as an innovative instrument for green finance and provides a review of policy actions and options to promote further market development and growth. The report provides an overview of global green bond market developments to date, barriers to growth, policy tools that can be applied to scale the market further, and quantitative scenarios for green bond market growth from 2015 to 2035.
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.