Scaling Up Green Bond Markets for Sustainable Development: A strategic guide for the public sector to stimulate private sector market development for green bonds argues that with the right support in place USD 1 trillion of green bonds could be issued a year by 2020 – providing a significant contribution to closing the investment gap for climate-friendly infrastructure in both developed economies and emerging markets. It argues for several sets of policy actions to support and enable the green bond market to grow:
- Market building activities are the low cost means to enable green bond markets to grow: Establish green project pipeline, strengthen local bond markets, strategic public green bond issuance and development of green bond standards.
- Proven support tools provide an additional boost to the market at its early stage: Strategic public green bond investment, credit enhancement, tax incentives and development of instruments to aggregate assets and structure risks.
- Innovative ideas are being trialled in some countries: Adjust risk weightings for green investments, preference green investments in central bank operations.
The purpose of this paper, The Value of Everything, is to begin the process of clarifying global asset value especially as may be affected by the sustainability (or lack thereof) of financial systems, and not just that which is represented by institutional assets under management. This paper, therefore, will answer this question of what is the actual total value of all global asset classes individually and in aggregate, towards helping inform money flows as they relate to this overall global stock, and how do they or can they influence total value, as well as how should these stocks and flows shift to enable the financial system to become truly sustainable and how to measure for that.
Electronic markets and high-frequency trading (HFT) now comprise over half of all securities trading on both public “lit” exchanges and “unlit” dark pools and electronic platforms.
On 3 November 2014 Ethical Markets Media and the UNEP Inquiry convened an expert seminar in New York, bringing together securities market experts and traders to examine how the issues of electronic markets and high-frequency trading relate to the broader efficiency, effectiveness and resilience of financial markets in the face of environmental and social challenges, and to consider the potential of several market-based reforms.
