The COP26 summit in Glasgow underscored the importance of climate resilience as a key policy goal around the world. As governments, businesses, and other entities look for capital to help meet their climate resilience goals, green bonds could represent an opportunity to attract and leverage new private finance and catalyze local markets to support public climate resilience initiatives. Simultaneously, investors have a growing interest in providing capital to fund green bonds, and demand for investing in green bonds has begun to surpass the available supply. Given this heightened interest from both issuers and investors, green bonds could emerge as one key source of capital to help facilitate the necessary energy, land, ecosystem, infrastructure, and industrial system transitions to build resilience in the face of climate change.

At the same time, if the use of green bonds to finance climate resilience increases, it could be necessary to ensure these investments are in fact contributing to greater resilience in the nations, regions, or communities they support. The significance of green bonds may depend not only on having a lot of them but also on carefully developing, investing, and tracking projects against the larger goal of climate resilience. This leaves policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in this space with a key question: how can these bonds contribute to greater climate resilience over time?

Read the full article about green bonds by Karishma V. Patel and Michelle E. Miro at the Rand Blog.