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2022 | Book

Green Investing

Changing Paradigms and Future Directions

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About this book

This book provides a unique picture of green finance by highlighting, under both theoretical and practical lenses, current changing paradigms and future directions in this field. The book is founded upon four major aspects that characterize current debates in green finance: products and services, financial innovation, green washing and transparency, and external pressures. The book is particularly useful to understand the current perimeter of the field; identify the potentials and challenges of the sector; explore current changing paradigms and its potentials to act as drivers for mainstreaming green finance; and conceptualize future directions of the field, with particular focus on its role in the post-COVID recovery plans.

The book therefore is not only useful for deriving theoretical or practical implications for researchers and policy makers, but also to capture the evolving complexity of the field at the eve of extraordinary and green-driven changes in financial industry and in policy programs. The book also opens up interesting questions on theoretical advances in financial theory derived from these innovations and accelerated by the pandemic. It will be of interest to scholars and students from different academic disciplines such as economics, finance, political science, and entrepreneurship, as well as practitioners interested in green finance and in the financing of environmentally impactful organizations and projects.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction
Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the relevance of the topics addressed in this book, and to present its aim and structure, by identifying the main themes of each book’s chapter. The chapter synthetically assesses the factors that have led green investing to a turning point, and the role played by recent socio-economic, academic, and regulatory evolutions in the industry.
Alessandro Rizzello
Chapter 2. What’s in a Name? Mapping the Galaxy of Green Finance
Abstract
Green finance is an emerging and rapidly growing field of research, concerned with the financial implications of environmental protection for industries and firms, and the need to transition to a sustainable economy. The financial industry needs to adjust to these environmental changes, which offer many opportunities for wealth and growth. The growing attention to environmental issues is strictly connected to the growth of financial flows oriented to attaining environmental goals. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the topic of green finance. For this purpose, the chapter summarizes the state of the art of this newly formed interdisciplinary field by setting out definitional boundaries and a conceptual framework, including the instruments, markets, and actors in this field. The market ecosystem is analyzed based on the results of the literature review. Specifically, a segmentation of the market is derived and recent regulation is focused upon. Moreover, the chapter describes asset classes, including the green finance spans and typologies of the financial instruments employed.
Alessandro Rizzello
Chapter 3. The Green Financing Framework Combining Innovation and Resilience: A Growing Toolbox of Green Finance Instruments
Abstract
Green financial markets are growing rapidly globally. Such rapid increase derives from the ability of such products to ensure, beyond environmental returns, adequate financial performances. More recently, beyond environmentally aligned financial products, those instruments that seek to generate a positive environmental impact have enriched the toolbox of green financial tools. However, alongside the expansion of the green finance instruments continuum, practitioners and scholars have raised many concerns about the need for standardized tools to assess the quality and performance of such investments. Within this context, though the phenomenon of green bonds has been widely studied, there are still few academic studies focusing on the emerging and innovative green finance instruments, and many related issues are still far from being fully understood. Based on these considerations, this chapter aims to explore how the landscape of green financial instruments is evolving in theory and in practice, and to reveal useful directions for future research in this field. A case study approach is employed to demonstrate how innovative green financial tools have been applied in environmentally oriented projects, by highlighting their similarities, differences, and potentials. The chapter provides also useful implications for the green finance market development.
Alessandro Rizzello
Chapter 4. Green Finance and SDGs: Emerging Trends in the Design of Green Investment Portfolios
Abstract
This chapter explores the evolution in the design of green portfolios in the financial industry. The green portfolio targets environmental returns, such as reducing the effects of climate change through low-carbon initiatives, making resources more efficient, and minimizing pollution. The alignment strategies for these kinds of non-financial returns assume different forms, increasingly subject to regulation from legal and financial authorities. Within this context, portfolios of investments closely aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular to SDG Green Themes, are registering rapid growth. A growing number of sustainability portfolios target environment-related UN SDGs, such as clean water and sanitation (SDG 8), climate action (SDG 13), and affordable and clean energy (SDG 7). In addition, the simultaneous pressures for transparency in the green alignment, deriving from the adoption of recent legislative and regulatory standards in this field, are forcing financial actors to adopt more standardized and compliant solutions for their green portfolio strategies. This chapter gives an overview of the most important strategies adopted in designing green portfolios in the financial industry, and describes the role of the financial intermediation chain in terms of both opportunities and emerging trends.
Alessandro Rizzello
Chapter 5. Beyond Greenwashing: An Overview of Possible Remedies
Abstract
The chapter engages with the concept of greenwashing as an emerging issue in the financial world, with particular relevance to the sustainable finance industry. Starting by examining the definition, the main features, and the origin of this phenomenon, the chapter has two aims: to identify the main and widely recognized forms of greenwashing in green finance; and to specify useful tools that could be adopted to mitigate this risk. The chapter reveals interesting insights on the role that emerging approaches, such as the introduction of impact measurement practices, will play in the growth of the green investment industry, by distinguishing between financial operators that invest with environmental impact, and those that invest for environmental impact.
Alessandro Rizzello
Chapter 6. Financing the Green Recovery: The New Directions of Finance After the COVID-19 Crisis
Abstract
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has had a global impact on lives, livelihoods, and economies. In response, governments across the world have diverted budgetary funds toward relief efforts. In order to address the negative impact of the pandemic, countries recognized the need to create longer-term economic recovery packages to address the resultant challenges. In addition, the crisis also provides a unique opportunity to address some of the structural and strategic challenges that existed even before the pandemic, yet had never received sufficient attention or resources from policymakers. Chief among these is how to deal with the challenge of climate change through the mobilization of green finance. Such a context of epochal transformation for green investing meets parallels evolution into the financial academic studies. This chapter draws from the previous chapters’ theoretical and empirical findings by providing an integrated framework that bridges together environmental sustainability and financial theory, with the green-led paradigm shifts now occurring within the financial system due to the pandemic. The results present implications useful to investigate new directions of finance, to deal with the immense issues of sustainability orientation in the post-covid recovery plans, and related opportunities to bring about change in the current financial system.
Alessandro Rizzello
Chapter 7. Conclusions
Abstract
This chapter provides concluding remarks on the results obtained in this book, by clarifying the main research contributions of each chapter. In addition, the chapter synthetically assesses a set of themes that will help in designing future research in the field of green finance.
Alessandro Rizzello
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Green Investing
Author
Alessandro Rizzello
Copyright Year
2022
Electronic ISBN
978-3-031-08031-9
Print ISBN
978-3-031-08030-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08031-9