Page 59 - Finanancial Management_2022

Money for a

green future

Earth Day spotlights investments to fund
the world’s transition to a green economy.

arth Day has been celebrated every 22
April since 1970 to remind people of their
duty to protect the natural world. This
year, Earth Day organisers highlight the
E role companies and governments can play
to fund the world’s transition to a green economy.
A rising number of businesses are using new
financial instruments — vanilla bonds labelled as
transition finance, sustainability-linked bonds, and
sustainability-linked sukuk for those in Islamic
finance — to finance environmental, social, and
governance plans. In the past two years, Tesco, H&M,
Etihad Airways, and many others each issued
hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of
sustainability-linked bonds where the bonds’
interest rate rises if they fail to meet their emissions
reduction targets.
In the public sector, Poland is set to receive €3.5
billion ($3.95 billion), the largest grant to date from
the EU’s Just Transition Fund, to help the country
transition to cleaner sources of energy and reskill its
local workforce. Almost 90,000 people rely on
Poland’s coal sector for their livelihood.