Policy Lever: Enhancing Market Practice
Examples
Key approaches include:- Fiduciary duty and capacity: clarifying that duties to clients include sustainability factors and including requirements for knowledge and training on sustainability for fiduciaries.
- Incentives: Encouraging asset owners to ensure better alignment of incentives along the investment chain.
- Prudential risk management regulation: Integrating sustainability into guidance & requirements on risk management and controls.
- Stress tests: Developing scenarios to test impact of environmental shocks on assets and business models.
- Capital requirements: Calibrating capital requirements to incorporate environmental factors.
- Disclosure requirements: Making environmental reporting by financial institutions and non-financial corporations mandatory.
- Equity analysis: Encouraging greater transparency in equity analysis of incorporation of sustainability factors.
- Credit ratings: Encouraging the integration of sustainability risk factors into credit analysis.
- Green assets Adjusting standards and rules to facilitate capital raising (e.g. green bonds, green sukuks, green IPOs, yieldcos).
- Indexes: Ensuring that benchmarks and indices reflect critical sustainability factors.
Impacts
These measures provide critical foundations of information needed to sensitise financial decision making to environmental impacts and risks, but they are likely to have a modest impact unless they are combined with additional shifts that make these risks financially material.Inquiry Publications
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China Green Finance Task Force Report: Green Funds
Date: 02-Apr-2015This paper sets out the case for promoting the development of green industry funds as public-private partnerships (PPPs) to use limited government funding to leverage private capital into green sectors. It is envisaged that green industry funds will serve as the platform through which private capital can converge into professionally managed green investments with government as one investment
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Financing the Future
Date: 06-Feb-2017Italy’s Ministry of Environment, Land and Sea, in partnership with UN Environment, launched the National Dialogue on Sustainable Finance in February 2016 to identify practical market and policy options to mobilize Italy’s financial system for sustainable development and climate action. The conclusions of the paper are: Italy faces a strategic opportunity to harness its financial
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Fintech and Sustainable Development – Assessing the Implications
Date: 14-Dec-2016The report, a companion to the second edition of “The Financial System We Need”, assesses how the financial system’s core functions are likely to be disrupted by financial technology (“fintech”) innovations and how they could help – or hinder – efforts to align financing with sustainable development. It considers ways to: Unlock greater financial inclusion by
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China Green Finance Task Force Report: Stock Index
Date: 02-Apr-2015Traditional energy and other highly polluting industries account for a significant share of China’s major stock indices, meaning that passive investments based on stock indices encourage investment polluting industries. Creating green stock indices (stock indices with a significant share of green enterprises) is an international practice to increase the share of green investment by institutional
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Input from the Netherlands to the UNEP Inquiry
Date: 20-Oct-2015This note summarizes the input provided to the Inquiry at a meeting with representatives from the Dutch financial sector ranging from public policymakers and regulators to the largest banks, asset managers, insurance companies and sustainable frontrunners. The policy recommendations include best practices, financial market policy and regulatory innovations to help bring about the green economy
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The Role of Policy-Driven Institutions
Date: 24-Aug-2015A variety of interventions can be used to develop national financial systems and provide local access to affordable, long-term finance. This paper considers four key categories of actions: voluntary action; priority sector lending; regulatory or financial incentives as well as direct lending by policy-driven financial institutions. It particularly focuses on the role of policy-driven institutions such
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China Green Finance Task Force Report: Green Insurance
Date: 02-Apr-2015The rapid and continuous increase of environmental incidents in China in recent years has led to severe impacts on its sustainable social and economic development and public health. This paper sets out the case for green insurance as a market-based risk management mechanism which could play a proactive role in preventing and transferring environmental pollution risks and
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China Green Taskforce Report: Green IPOs
Date: 02-Apr-2015Developing innovative and growing green industry sectors in China depends on broadening funding source beyond government loans to capital markets. One of the major bottlenecks for entering the stock market for Chinese green enterprise today is the slow IPO process. The paper recommends that the CSRC simplify the IPO review and approval processes for green enterprises, in particular by: Develop a green
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Lessons from Inclusive Banking Experiments in South Africa and Kenya
Date: 23-Aug-2015This paper examines the experience of inclusive banking experiments in South Africa and Kenya. The Kenyan example revolves around the development of mobile money through market led innovation alongside evolutions in the legislative and regulatory process. In South Africa a different approach was taken, with the development of the multi-sector Financial Sector Charter and a National Bank Account (‘Mzansi’) Hawkins
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China Green Finance Task Force Report: Lender Liability
Date: 02-Apr-2015In the event of a project causing environmental damage, in many countries its commercial lenders can also face legal liabilities. This forces lenders to take environmental impact into consideration in making investment and financing decisions. This paper makes the case for establishing environmental legal liabilities for commercial banks in China and highlights steps to take to implement this: Revise