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launched its Green Finance Initiative, which I am delighted to chair, and designated 2016 the ‘year of green finance’.Developed in partnership with HM Treasury and what is now the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the City Corporation’s initiative pools international expertise and is intended to promote the sector’s development, strengthen market infrastructure and advocate specific regulatory and policy changes that might better channel funding toward green projects. The initiative has since convened a number of major fora with both international and domestic stakeholders, and is in the process of benchmarking the UK’s green financial flows and market sentiment; investigating climate-triggered product mechanisms; promoting and enhancing municipal authorities’ access to green finance; and convening a series of green workshops. We intend to better quantify the market’s challenges and opportunities, and to enhance the sector’s development globally.Indeed, the UK’s outlook has always been global – not just since the Brexit referendum on 23 June this year. The City of London Corporation has long championed emerging financial sectors whose development necessitates cross-border collaboration, from renminbi trading and Islamic finance to fintech development and international legal services. It is concerned with the interests of the whole financial sector, whether it is based in London or not, and believes passionately in the role financial markets can play in engendering a low-carbon transition. That is why the City’s Green Finance Initiative comprises not just London-based experts but practitioners in Paris, Stockholm, Edinburgh and New York. Green finance must be developed on a truly global scale to be successful, and must make use of all resources available to it. Here in the UK, that means vibrant domestic green platforms, pioneering institutions and unique clusters of expertise. Factors that have already positioned London as a world-leading hub for green financial services, and the destination of choice, for example, for the very first Chinese, Indian and – just last month – Finnish green bonds, among others. Leaving the EU divests the City of neither its priorities nor its business sense, and London will continue to promote and strengthen the sector’s development and, we believe, remain at the heart of green financial flows. The sector’s growth has raised an obvious question – what is green? The answer differs significantly by geography, reflecting the fact that each nation’s journey toward carbon neutrality is bespoke and that even domestically one investor’s green parameters may differ from another. Many emerging markets also operate on a longer time-frame for reducing emissions than Europe, and even neighbours will disagree about the role of nuclear energy or the acceptability of clean coal. As long as the financial products facilitating this transition are transparent and properly accredited, however, investors can choose for themselves the assets that best suit their green mandate, and the market will price instruments accordingly.Green finance is no fad. Asset owners everywhere – from pension holders to sovereign wealth funds – are increasingly looking for sustainable investments, and those who once passively divested of high-carbon assets are now actively seeking to learn about and obtain low-carbon products. That is why it is so important that organisations like the G7, G20, the UN and others continue the work begun at COP21. By laying out the investment opportunities associated with national energy and climate change commitments, institutional and even retail investors will obtain the certainty they need to begin facilitating the transition toward carbon-neutrality.Raising capital for green projects, investing savings in low-carbon infrastructure and encouraging a shift in societal attitudes towards long-term savings: these, together with facilitating implementation of the Paris Agreement, are the contributions the global financial sector can make in the drive toward a more sustainable economy. In recent years the industry has perhaps been too cautious to admit it, but global capital markets have the capacity to enact fundamental economic change; and that is precisely what the green finance sector might do. ■ABOUT THE AUTHORSir Roger Gifford is the Chairman of the City of London’s Green Finance Initiative. He is also the UK Country Head of SEB, based in the City of London, and began his career in the financial sector at S.G. Warburg & Co before joining Enskilda Securities, then a subsidiary of SEB, in 1982. Prior to his appointment as Head of SEB London in 2000, he headed the bank’s operations for six years in Japan. He has worked in the primary debt and equity capital markets most of his career.Sir Roger is Vice Chairman and a past Chairman of the Association of Foreign Banks in London, President of the Bank Workers Charity and a Non-Executive Director of Multrees Investor Services. He was Lord Mayor of the City of London in 2013 and was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to international business, culture and the City.Pictured: Sir Roger GiffordFINANCE AND INVESTMENT 083