Sean Kidney is co-founder of the Climate Bonds Initiative. His background is in stakeholder communications, social issues strategy and pension fund marketing.
Sean is also:
- A director of Climate Bonds Initiative parent, the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets, an international, non-partisan network of finance sector professionals, academics and others who see the need for fundamental changes to improve financial market integrity, stability and efficiency.
- A steering committee member of the TransformUK business/NGO coalition, pushing for a rapid shift to a low-carbon economy.
- Chair of the UK Local Energy Efficiency Coalition (LEEP), developing “scalable and sustainable financial solutions” suitable for climate bond financing at an institutional investor scale.
- An advisor to Climate Risk (Europe) Ltd, consulting on risks and opportunities for infrastructure players and for insurers
- A former marketing advisor to a number of the largest Australian pension funds.
Christoph,
Did I reply? If I didn’t, then my sincere apologies; I can only weakly say that we’re in a mad period of developing the standard and are not on top of as much as we should be.
We’re expecting costs to be around 1 basis point, but this will of course depend on the scale of the bond and on the type of underlying physical asset being used. Wind energy assets will allow a much more cost-effective certification review than biofuels, for example.
The primary cost involved is the verification of bond claims by a licenced third party verifier (e.g. DNV or KPMG), so it’s their cost that is the issue.
What assets are you looking at raising a bond against?
Sean