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The U.S. branch of the Green City Bonds Coalition, a group of global organizations working to facilitate green bond expansion, has released The Green Muni Bonds Playbook. This fifteen page report provides guidance for cities and other public entities that issue municipal bonds to pay for infrastructure such as energy, water and transportation. It describes the state of the market, the benefits of issuing green bonds, how the market defines what is green and the steps cities need to take to access this growing market. It also includes case studies from a number of cities.
Member organizations of the U.S. Green City Bonds Coalition include As You Sow, C40 Cities, CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project), Ceres, Climate Bonds Initiative, and Natural Resources Defense Council.
Green Bonds in Brief: Risk, Reward, and Opportunity, a new report from As You Sow and the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, offers a look at how green bonds, an exciting financial instrument directing funds to environmental and climate projects, offer an opportunity for both investors and issuers to encourage sustainable growth.
Green bonds are on track to provide forty billion dollars in 2014 and one hundred billion dollars in 2015 to green projects such as energy efficiency, renewable power, and cleaner transit.
Green Bonds in Brief addresses:
• Green bond market fundamentals
• Factors driving green bond market growth
• Obstacles and challenges facing the green bond market
• Case studies of successful green bond issuances
Join Climate Bonds Initiative for a series of webinars presenting the new report Bonds & Climate Change: the State of the Market 2014. Featuring Sean Kidney and Bridget Boulle of Climate Bonds Initiative, the webinars will discuss hurdles and future potential in the Green Bonds market.
Some key report findings:
Forty billion dollars in 2014. One hundred billion in 2015. That’s how much funding Green Bonds are projected to provide in the next year and a half.
Green Bonds offer an opportunity for both investors and issuers to encourage sustainable growth through green projects such as energy efficiency, renewable power, and cleaner transit. As You Sow’s Green Bonds: Financing a Sustainable Future webinar covers issues such as the latest trends in green fixed-income financing, integrating green bonds into a portfolio, how green bonds compare to regular bonds, the impact of rising interest rates, and developments in product standardization and secondary markets.
“It’s catching on like wildfire… We’ve reached the Holy Grail, which is the bond market.” - Michael Eckhart, managing director at Citigroup Inc., founder of the American Council on Renewable Energy
On the sidelines of the Renewable Energy Finance Forum in New York, Citigroup managing director Michael Eckhart predicted that the Green Bond market could reach $100 billion in 2015.