Green bonds to grow in Asia, but issuers face greater scrutiny, standards

Sharing his views on green bonds' growth in the Asia Pacific, SMU Professor of Finance (Practice) Dave Fernandez, who is also the Director of the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics and Co-Director of Singapore Green Finance Centre at SMU, noted that end-investors do not discriminate between the greenwashers and genuinely green funds. "More than 90 per cent of the world's largest companies produce corporate social responsibility reports, but third parties review only a minority of these," he said. "There are valid concerns about the reliability of such self-reporting. The bottom line is that we'll likely see regulators step up in this area."