Green Bonds Issuance to Cross Record $ 200 bn Mark in 2019: Moody’s

The global green bonds issuance in 2019 are expected to reach and perhaps even cross the record USD 200 billion mark.

According to a new analysis, the global green bonds issuance in the current financial year are expected to reach and perhaps even cross the record USD 200 billion mark.

The global green bond market hit a new all-time quarterly high in the second quarter of 2019 as issuers brought  USD 66.6 billion of green bonds to market globally, propelling the first half of 2019 issuance to a record USD 117 billion, credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service has revealed in a new analysis.

“Following its strong performance so far this year, the green bond market remains on course to eclipse our 2019 forecast of  USD 200 billion of total issuance,” the agency, an arm of the financial services firm Moody’s Corporation, said in its latest report. 

It added that the first-half issuance was 47 percent higher than issuance in the same period of 2018 after issuance grew just 11 percent year-on-year between the first six months of 2017 and 2018.

This growth came despite a 1.9 percent decline in overall global bond issuance during the same period. Corporates were the strongest contributors to overall issuance, with USD 14.9 billion of non-financial corporate issuance and  USD 13.6 billion of financial corporate issuance accounting for 22 percent and 20 percent of total volumes, respectively.

“European issuers had a leading 54 percent market share, supported by a large debut USD 6.7 billion sovereign green bonds from the Government of the Netherlands,” the report said. It added that green bond issuance has expanded rapidly in both China and India after national green bond guidelines came into effect.

In July, a report had revealed that the global investments in green energy projects in the first half of 2019 were $117.6 billion, a drop of 14 percent from the 2018 figure.

The first half of 2019 saw a 39 percent drop in green energy investments in the world’s biggest market, China, to  USD 28.8 billion, the lowest figure for any half-year period since 2013, according to the latest figures from BloombergNEF (BNEF).

BNEF’s figures for clean energy investment in the first half of 2019 show mixed fortunes for the world’s major markets. The “big three” of China, the U.S. and Europe all showed falls, but while the drop in the U.S. was a modest 6 percent at $23.6 billion and that in Europe was 4 percent at $22.2 billion, China took the biggest hit with its 39 percent setback.