UN Climate Newsroom, 20 March 2018 - The Green Bond Pledge is a new initiative that seeks to have cities, public authorities and world’s largest corporates commit to increased use of green bond finance to ensure new infrastructure meets the challenges of climate change and contributes to the accelerated transformation of the economy that is necessary and achievable by 2020. The Pledge involves a simple declaration with broad and far-reaching impact.
In opening remarks at the launch event in London, Mission2020 leader and former UN Climate Change chief Christiana Figueres called on cities, governments and corporations to increase the use of green bonds to finance infrastructure programs.
Developed by international climate finance and sustainability groups, the Green Bond Pledge supports the goals of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. It is based on the premise that public and private sector bonds financing long-term infrastructure and capital projects need to address and incorporate climate risk and impacts. Green bonds contribute to environmental and climate outcomes and their use signals that these factors have been deliberately incorporated into the financing planning and deployment of new projects and developments.
More than a dozen organizations from around the globe have helped to develop the pledge, including the Climate Bonds Initiative, Mission2020, CERES, CDP, Citizens Climate Lobby, California Governor’s Office, California Treasurer’s Office, Global Optimism, NRDC and The Climate Group.
Signatories will be widely sought from cities, municipal authorities and corporations. The initial aim is to gather significant momentum in the run up to the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, with the campaign continuing into 2019.
The groups also released today an invitation to institutional investors to be signatories supporting the proposition that climate-related risk will increasingly exert pressure on infrastructure and capital project integrity, which bond issuers and investors must pay attention to when committing public resources and investment capital. The international green bond market, along with other green investments, not only provides a useful mechanism to finance solutions to climate change, but also represents an investment.
Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change and a Global Climate Action Summit co-chair said:
"Financing the transition to a low carbon, resilient economy will be a key to ever more ambitious national climate action plans and realizing the Paris Climate Change Agreement goals.”
"Green bonds are among an array of exciting and rapidly growing, new financial instruments that are going to help us get there. I warmly welcome the Pledge as one among many inspiring new initiatives that will launch climate action in 2018 to the next level of ambition.”
Read the full press release here