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

Accessing capital at the massive scale needed to finance a transition to a low carbon, sustainable economy faces is a tremendous challenge. But the green bond market shows tremendous promise, and is booming as investors clamor for fixed income investments with environmental attributes. Green bonds represent a significant opportunity, with some estimates predicting that green bonds could supply up to 84% of the private, third-party capital required to finance the transition to a low carbon economy. Constant oversubscriptions of green bond issuances are indicative of the investor appetite for solutions, and of increasing public awareness regarding sustainability issues.

While green bonds are not a silver bullet, they represent an opportunity to provide the $53 trillion in additional energy investments needed by 2035 to avoid catastrophic climate change. Download Green Bonds in Brief now to learn more.

“Climate change is not just an environmental challenge. It is a fundamental threat to economic development.”

– Jim Yong Kim – President, The World Bank