We have four new and distinguished Climate Bonds Advisory Panel members:
- Pedro Moura Costa, E2 environmental finance, co-founder EcoSecurities- Stuart Clenaghan, Eco System Services Limited and former Lehman/UBS fixed income manager- Jonathan Maxwell, founding partner, Sustainable Development Corporation- David Wood, Institute for Responsible Investment, Harvard University
According to Pensions & Investment magazine: "Money managers, institutional investors and others are combining efforts to drive the nascent green bonds market forward, and the fruits of their labor are becoming apparent."
It's an all-cast story, with quotes from CalSTRS, SSgA, UKSIF, SEB, IIGCC, AP3, Nikko, Calvert (if you know all the acronyms you qualify as a green bond groupie). The story also mentions the Climate Bonds Standards.
http://www.pionline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110418/PRINTSUB/304189979/1031/PIIssueAlert01
Eversheds law partner Michele Thomas, speaking at this week's Environmental Bonds Conference in London, said that the banks her firm has been working with on renewable energy transactions are preparing to securitise those loans and sell their exposure via green bond structures. Eversheds is one of the top ten law firms in the UK.
Environmental Finance reports that she said “All the work we’re doing in certain technologies – for example solar – is done with a view to securitisation,” she said. “The banks realise they can’t continue to fund on a traditional project finance basis – they need an exit.”
The draft Climate Bonds Standard has now been release for public comment - you have 30 days! Please do review and comment. Media release is below:
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A recent report prepared for Barclays by Accenture has placed the need for the standardisation of green bonds front and centre for efforts to finance a low carbon economy.
The report estimated that up to €2.9 trillion of procurement and development capital will be needed for the roll-out of low carbon technologies across the EU25 by 2020. They estimate that 'green' bonds in the form of asset-back securities could account for €1.4 trillion of this total. The figure includes the sum of likely project finance debt, asset finance term loans, asset lease financing, and primary bonds that could be securitised into green asset-backed securities.
Environmentally-themed Uridashi bonds (non-JPY denominated bonds sold directly to Japanese individual investors) have been popular in Japan for some time, making it by far the biggest market for such bonds. We've now seen issues by everyone from the World Bank and the ADB to Norway's Kommunalbanken, who have just issued USD180 million worth. Nikko AM has two retail funds that predominantly invest in World Bank Green Bonds collectively now at half a billion US dollars.
In what some people read as a sign of pent-up retail interest, UK green energy supplier Ecotricity has said that they're recent green bond offering to customers has been so successful they're going to become a permanent fixture.
The first bond was two times oversubscribed, raising £10 million. See the full story an 'Environment Finance'.
Speaking at a State Street Global Advisors Green Bonds Summit in Boston, Climate Bonds Initiative Chair Sean Kidney announced that the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) had joined the Governing Authority of the Climate Bonds Certification and Standards Scheme.
The Standards Scheme will help spur the growth of the global green bonds market by giving investors and governments an easy way to assess the integrity of environmental claims.
Mr Kidney said: "According to the International Energy Agency we need at least a trillion dollars a year to be flowing into low-carbon industries if we're to avert catastrophic climate change. That money will come largely from bond markets. We need to ensure it's invested properly."
Ireland has set out plans to create a green version of its job-spawning International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), and hopes that it could create 7,000 jobs over the next five years.
A lot of the initiatives are aimed at the carbon markets and green equity funds, but Paul Harris, head of natural resources risk management at Bank of Ireland Global Markets, and a member of the Green International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) Working Group, has one eye on future environmental bonds markets.
