Climate Bonds Blog

The Australian Conservation Foundation has just released a useful new report, "Funding the transition to a clean energy economy" (see http://goo.gl/AGPdQ). Among other things, the report recommends the Australian Government issue Climate Bonds, tied directly to financing clean energy.

The Climate Bonds Initiative has begun work on a crop of new projects. We're looking for a London-based researcher/analyst to help.

The successful candidate will be involved in a variety of projects developing workable policies and solutions to scale up investment into the low carbon economy.

An ideal candidate will have strong communication skills, a good working knowledge of climate policy, economics and finance, imagination and a sense of humor.

Send details to sean(a)climatebonds.net.

An interesting “Financing Energy Efficiency Retrofits in Buildings” discussion paper recently released in Madrid argues that a significant expansion of energy efficiency retrofits can be driven by a model that employs:

-       Standardized contracts adopted by a wide variety of loan originators, such as banks, utilities, ESCOs and other retail outlets.

-       A re-financing fund that agrees to buy loans using the standardized contract (thus driving adoption). The fund then taps the wholesale financing markets.

Fiduciary duty for a pension trustee is about protecting the financial interests of fund members in the long term. But pension funds and other institutional investors spend more time looking at the trees rather than at the forest – they invest effort in asset management, yet virtually nothing in identifying and taking steps to manage systemic risks. This is despite the fact that a large proportion of their returns and risks are driven by systemic changes - value destruction in recent years is clear evidence of that.

The biggest systemic risk is climate change, where governments have to take decisive action within a very short time to have a reasonable chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.