Unibail-Rodamco, a large European commercial property company, yesterday announced that it had placed a landmark EUR750mn green bond based on a portfolio of green buildings.
The bond was 3.4 times oversubscribed with the order book reaching EUR2.5bn in under 2 hours!
While the EIB, along with the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank, has been issuing climate bonds, other development banks are not so convinced. The huge German development bank KfW, for example, sees little material benefit in green bonds; their German Government rated borrowing costs can't really get lower and they don't need to find new investors. And they're right - from a bank treasury perspective it's merely a distracting idea.
Bridget Boulle reporting
We've just heard that the European Investment Bank (EIB) is making a further EUR500 million ($690m) tap of its Climate Awareness Bond that matures in November 2019. The bond, which was first issued in July 2013, has now been tapped 5 times putting it EUR2 billion outstanding! The lead underwriters for this tap were: Credit Agricole, Citi, Morgan Stanley and RBC.
The word is that they were initially going for EUR250m but it closed at EUR500m.
The webinar today - Tues 18 Feb @1pm EST/6pm GMT - is hosted by "AsYouSow.org".
Three of us will be talking:
If you're interested, join at Green Bonds: Trailblazing Issuers Accelerating the Low Carbon Economy webinar.
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We've heard that EIB has just done a SEK900m tap, taking the amount of this 2019 maturing bond to SEK3bn ($466m) in total. Buyers were Swedish institutional investors. No further details yet, except that SEB was the underwriter.
(BTW, in my earlier email about the NIB EUR40m bond I mistakenly noted SEB as the underwriter - an error - I meant to say Credit Agricole CIB. This EIB SEK bond is the SEB one.)
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Anne Simpson of CalPRS, at last month's UN Investor Summit on Climate Risk, warning that catastrophic climate change will be a disaster for investors:
The Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) this week issued a 5 year, EUR40 million ($55m), floating rate note, part of their ongoing "Environmental Bond" programme. This is the fifth bond they've issued under this program, with just under $500m worth of NIB Environmental Bonds currently outstanding.
By Bridget Boulle, Climate Bonds Initiative. Prepared for Responsible-Investor.com
2013 has been a big year for green and climate bonds - it was the year that everyone started talking about them. It was the year that totals outstanding of explicitly green “labelled” bonds doubled, the issuer list diversified and investors in both the mainstream and ESG/SRI markets became interested. Here is short overview of developments.
PARIS - Dr Michael Molitor, Kristian Brüning and Dr Alex Rau today join the Climate Bonds team to support a newly convened supervisory Climate Science Advisory Committee, supervising eligibility criteria for the Climate Bond Standards.
A Climate Science Reference Framework will anchor the Climate Bonds Taxonomy and Climate Bond Standards to projections of needed emission reductions and adaptation measures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and internationally respected climate science research centres.
PARIS - Climate Bonds today announced a timetable for the release of eligibility criteria under the Climate Bond Standards and Certification Scheme. Eligibility criteria are used to determine what assets can be linked to Green Bonds and Climate Bonds.
Criteria are drafted by domain expert committees drawn up from internationally recognized agencies. Once drafted, criteria are subject to public consultation periods before final approval by the Climate Bond Standards Advisory Board*. Criteria are then published online as a public resource.
The European Commission’s Directorate-General of Climate Action has commissioned a project to look at what Europe’s role should be in "shifting private finance towards climate-friendly Investments" – both within the EU and internationally.
As their brief says:
