Green finance will help put the brakes on climate change, but Asian companies risk missing out

Speaking as a panellist at the CNA Leadership Summit on Thursday (22 April) in Singapore, SMU Professor of Finance (Practice) Dave Fernandez, Director of SMU’s Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics and Co-Director at the Singapore Green Finance Centre said, “If you look at our region, we still have a lot more work to do. We have to create a situation where the damage that you were doing by doing certain activities, the focus, clearly being on greenhouse gas emissions needs to have a price above zero." He added, "The question here in Asia is – are the companies ready? Are we going to miss that wave of global finance that’s flowing to the companies that have said, we’re going to embrace this ahead of any government regulations that come in? I think that’s the real challenge, because the money is going to be coming whether or not Asian companies are ready.”