This week, Green Bank representatives and clean energy finance leaders will gather in Tokyo to share experiences and identify ways that public and private investment can rapidly scale to meet climate change goals.
On Tuesday, the Japanese Green Finance Organisation (Japan’s Green Bank) will host the annual Green Bank Congress. Green Banks from Australia, UK, Connecticut and New York will be in attendance. They’ll be joined by thought leaders from Japan, other governments exploring Green Bank creation, and the Green Climate Fund, which is considering its own role in the Green Bank landscape. And on Wednesday the Green Bank Network (GBN) will hold its first member-wide meeting, where members will lay out plans for how the Network can enhance Green Bank practices around the world in 2017.
Then on Thursday and Friday, the OECD will host its third annual Green Investment Financing Forum (GIFF), a gathering of policymakers, institutional investors, multilateral development banks, and Green Banks to share best practices around innovative clean energy investment practices. Prior GIFFs, held the last two years in Paris, have focused on Green Bonds, Green Banks and other techniques for driving the massive amount of institutional capital available, but currently on the side lines of climate investment. The Coalition for Green Capital will be leading and participating in all of these events, along with our GBN partners at NRDC.
Just last month, the leaders of the G20 announced a new commitment to green finance. Ma Jun, Chief Economist of the People’s Bank of China wrote, that the G20’s Finance Ministers, “have become increasingly convinced that ‘green finance’ – financing environmentally sustainable growth – should be at the center of economic-development strategies. And specifically, in regards to China he wrote that his nation, “must establish a national-level Green Development Fund, much like the United Kingdom’s Green Investment Bank.”
That means national Green Banks are now under development in the three largest emitting countries on the planet – China, the United States and India. With representatives of all three nations in attendance this week in Tokyo, the global conversation on Green Banks and green finance has never been so important.
Please look for on-going reporting from this week’s Green Bank events in Tokyo.