Under the background of China’s green development strategy, China's green bonds have seen explosive growth. Latest statistics show that since the green bond market was officially opened in 2016, China has issued a total of 286 green bonds of all kinds with a size of 551.143 billion yuan after nearly two years of development. Especially since the second half of last year, the market has risen rapidly. In 2018, China issued 18 bonds amounted to 64.3 billion yuan in just three weeks.
Statistics show that in the full year of 2017, China has totally issued 185 green bonds (including green bonds and green asset-backed securities) both at home and abroad, amounting to 277.28 billion yuan, increasing 32.3 percent from the 83,209.02 billion yuan in 2016.
In addition to the rapid development of scale, China has also made progress in the formulation and improvement of the green bond system. Recently, the People's Bank of China and the China Securities Regulatory Commission jointly released the Guidance for Green Bond Rating and Accreditation (Interim). This is China’s first normative document to assess and certify green bonds. The guidance regulates the qualification, business commitment, business implementation, report, supervision and management.
"The standards for green bond certification are not uniform, leaving the arbitrage room for the market. Some issuers issue bonds under the disguise of green bonds.” A person from a third-party assessment agency in Beijing said that the guidance is more specific, which will compress the arbitrage space to promote the healthy development of the market.
"Despite the challenges we face, we expect that the green bond issuance in emerging markets will have strong prospects in 2018 as governments around the world are promoting climate and sustainable development policy planning and market development,” Moody's said in an earlier report. The report predicts that emerging market governments will increase support for their green bond in the coming quarters. For example, some emerging market regulators, regulatory agencies and market participants have released guidelines on the local green bond market.
(Translated by Coral Zhong)
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