Green bonds are one of the most prominent innovations in the area of sustainable finance over the past decade. However, to date there have only been a few academic studies on green bonds, and these have tended to focus on what impact green labels have on bond yields. Our analysis is one of the first empirical studies designed to address the broader questions of what attracts investors and issuers to the green bond market, the role of green bonds in shifting capital to more sustainable economic activity, and how green bonds impact the way organisations work with sustainability. Using Sweden as a case study, this paper provides insights into the rapid growth of the green bond market and how green bonds affect market participants' engagement with sustainability that are easily missed if one focuses only on how green bonds are marketed.
Obligations to reduce one's green house gas emissions appear to be difficult to justify prior to large-scale collective action because an individual's emissions have virtually no impact on the environmental problem. However, I show that individuals' emissions choices raise the question of whether or not they can be justified as fair use of what remains of a safe global emissions budget. This is true both before and after major mitigation efforts are in place. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to establish an obligation to reduce personal emissions because it appears unlikely that governments will in fact maintain safe emissions budgets. The result, I claim, is that under current conditions we lack outcome, fairness, promotional, virtue or duty based grounds for seeing personal emissions reductions as morally obligatory. KEYWORDS Individual obligations, global warming, emissions, non-ideal, fairness.'Had he been informed by an indisputable authority that the end of the world was to be finally accomplished by a catastrophic disturbance of the atmosphere, he would have assimilated the information under the simple idea of dirty weather, and no other, because he had no experience of cataclysms, and belief does not necessarily imply comprehension.' Joseph Conrad, Typhoon.
Prominent conceptualizations of policy coherence for sustainable development focus primarily on the roles of intra‐governmental policy processes and institutional interactions in shaping coherence between various agendas and policies. These technocratic understandings of coherence overlook the more political drivers of coherence, such as the vested interests or ideologies that may encourage or hinder efforts to achieve coherence. This paper addresses this gap by drawing on the comparative politics literature to facilitate a political understanding of policy coherence. It introduces an analytical framework hypothesizing how ideas, institutions, and interests (the three I's) may influence policy coherence at different policy stages. As such, it includes measures of how policy coherence is applied by different actors and institutions, and whose ideas and interests may be served by pursuing or not pursuing coherence. This article provides an example of how the framework can be applied to study policy coherence between two prominent international agendas: Agenda 2030 (incorporating the Sustainable Development Goals) and the Paris Agreement. Overall, the paper argues that the three I's influence policy options and shape the ambition and importance given to different agendas, goals and actors in pursuing or resisting policy coherence. This framework is suited for assessing the political divers of policy coherence through being applied to empirical data at global or national levels.
Severe climate-related disasters have already disproportionately affected some of the world’s most vulnerable countries, which are typically some of the least-responsible for the catastrophes. This report highlights the stalemate of international loss and damage support and what can be done to shore up higher-income countries’ responsibilities – starting with COP26.
There appear to be few ways available to improve the prospects for international cooperation to address the threat of global warming within the very short timeframe for action. I argue that the most effective and plausible way to break the ongoing pattern of delay in the international climate regime is for economically powerful states to take the lead domestically and demonstrate that economic welfare is compatible with rapidly decreasing GHG emissions. However, the costs and risks of acting first can be very large. This raises the question of whether it is fair to expect some states to go far ahead of others in an effort to improve the conditions for cooperation. I argue that a costly obligation to act unilaterally and to accept weak initial reciprocity can be justified and does not violate standards of fair burden sharing. Rather, the costs of creating the underlying conditions within which we can hope to achieve meaningful international cooperation are non--ideal burdens for which we can appropriately assign fair shares.
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