綠色債券之綠揭露探討與研究 綠色債券之定性研究

Abstract

Climate change has become an important topic around the world. Governments and organizations have called the attention of the public and taken actions to mitigate or adapt climate change. One approach of mitigating or adapting the climate change is to direct capital to projects or activities that have positive impact to the environment. By infusing financial capital to such projects or activities, money will be invested on projects or activities that benefit the environment rather than maximize the economic value without considering the environmental impact, and green bonds serve as a role for this purpose. Green bonds generally refer to bonds whose proceeds are used on projects or activities that benefit the environment. However, the green bond market does not have a mandatory and standardized guideline for green bond issuers. Therefore, bond issuers can mark their green bond programs so long as they can justify their classification. Concerns of lacking a mandatory and regulated guideline and a unified definition in the green bond market have been raised in a number of studies, but academic researches specifically for green bonds are not abundant, possibly because the market is still at its early stage and its size remaining small. As a result, the research is aimed at investigating the quality of green disclosure of green bond issuers. For data collection, publicly available corporate files are collected and studied in examining the quality of green bond disclosure from the sampled issuers. The list of green bond issuers is gathered from the Climate Bonds Initiative, and thirteen issuers are selected and their publicly available corporate files examined. The methodology of the research adopts a qualitative approach and employs a directed content analysis technique, which is deployed based on an existing theory, which refers to the combined green bond guideline and the four aspects of quality disclosure. In the research, the Green Bond Principles and the Climate Bond Standard are consolidated into one green bond guideline used to examine the corporate files of the chosen green bond issuers, and, on top of the examination of the green bond guideline, the four dimensions of quality disclosure are deployed to vet the quality of green bond disclosure of the chosen issuers. Further, a three-scale rating is assigned to each issuers and comment of best practice is suggested. The corporate files, the summary of disclosure, the issues observed, the rating, and best practice for the chosen issuers are listed in appendix, and research findings from vetting the quality of disclosure are showcased in the fourth section. The research findings include that green bond issuers with more green bonds issued have better quality and extent of disclosure, that green bond issuers of multinational development banks have better quality and extent of disclosure, that issuers from developed countries have better extent and quality of disclosure, that issuers of developed country within same industry can have different extent and quality of disclosure, and that outcome measure shows more inadequacy than does process measure. The research findings are expected to contribute to the transparency, standardization, and integrity of the green bond guideline and the green bond market.