To view a PDF of the report, click here.
Poland leads the way
12月成为欧洲的一个绿色债券的主权发行人，该消息被可持续发展金融市场的Cognoscenti迎来了惊喜和喜悦的迎接。
There was initial astonishment at the announcement from Warsaw because Poland is hardly known for its evangelism in the fight against greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has called on the government to clean up its energy sector, 81 percent of Poland’s power came from coal in 2015, and just 14 percent from renewables. “Poland’s annual mean concentration values of BaP [benzo(a)pyrene], found in coal tars among other things, and a cause of lung cancer, are the highest in Europe,” is one of a number of disturbing indicators mentioned in the IEA’s 2016 review of Poland’s energy policy.
This made Poland’s emphatic public statement about its commitment to cleaning up its environment all the more welcome. “We don’t hide the fact that we make intensive use of coal, which is our cheapest form of energy,” says Piotr Nowak, Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Finance in Warsaw. “But we also want to make it clear that we see ourselves as part of a community that cares strongly about the environment and sustainable development, and to demonstrate that we have a number of ongoing green projects.”
Poland’s Green Bond Framework
具体而言，波兰债券的收益专门用于去年政府出版的绿色债券框架中详述的六个区域。这些是可再生能源生成，清洁运输，可持续农业运营，造林，国家公园和污染土地的修复。
有些人认为谨慎倡议。基于伦敦的气候债券倡议欢迎这笔交易，但警告说，如果化石燃料的投资继续，这些项目的有益影响将是“完全否定”。
Nevertheless, champions of the green bond market were delighted by the launch of Poland’s €750 million five-year transaction — for at least two reasons. The first was that the issue, led by HSBC, JPMorgan and PKO Bank Polski, opened up an important new source of supply for the market. Although sub-sovereign and municipal borrowers from Johannesburg in South Africa to Gothenburg in Sweden have issued green bonds in the past, this was the first deal of its kind from a pure sovereign. According to Nowak, this created an unexpected complication in the marketing of the transaction. “Up to now, dedicated green accounts have typically been corporate bond funds, without a mandate to buy sovereign paper,” he explains. “So a number of investors had to get special approval from their risk departments to buy our bond.”
波兰语问题的胃口和债券定价展示了投资者对暴露于绿色发行的需求的力量。强大的发行前需求允许从最初指出5亿欧元的交易规模增加。它还允许定价在中间掉期中设定为48bps，平坦于波兰政府的收益曲线。
Strong demand also helped Poland to achieve one of its key objectives, which was to continue to diversify its investor base. “One of the reasons we were so pleased with how well the transaction was received was because 61 percent of the bonds were bought by dedicated green investors, almost all of which were new to the Polish sovereign credit,” says Nowak.
Now that Poland has established a green benchmark, Nowak says that the Treasury intends to build on its success. “We have indicated that this won’t be a one-off,” he says. “Our aim is to issue green bonds with some degree of regularity.”
This commitment will be welcomed by investors because it touches on the second — and perhaps more important — reason why stakeholders across the green bond universe were so delighted by December’s curtain-raiser for sovereign bonds in green format. This was the conviction that if coal-intensive Poland could embrace sustainable finance, then so could scores of other governments.
Nowak says that if the interest in Poland’s bond is any guide, there is no shortage of other sovereign borrowers that are studying the potential of the green market. “A number of sovereigns have asked us to share information with them about the documentation of the use of proceeds,” he says. “The main challenge for a sovereign issuer is to verify that the proceeds are not used for general purposes. So we opened a separate account which allows investors to follow the use of proceeds very closely, and ensure they are being used for green purposes.”
Growing interest from a number of sovereign borrowers in developed and emerging markets alike supports the upbeat forecasts made by some analysts about the potential continued expansion of the market in 2017. Moody’s, for example, advised in January that issuance volumes would set another record this year. The agency’s projection that new supply in 2017 may reach as high as $206 billion, compared with $93.4 billion in 2016, was based largely on continued robust growth from China and momentum generated by the Paris agreement on climate change in late 2015. —菲尔摩尔