A drop in the ocean: scaling up the blue bonds market
Approximately 71% of the earth’s surface is covered by water, yet bonds designed to support marine conservation are so far only a small segment of the fixed income market, how can it be scaled up?
With oceans being nature’s largest carbon sink and providing 50% of the oxygen we need, it is difficult to see why the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals 6 (clean water and sanitation) and 14 (life below water) are significantly underfunded.
Targeted green and sustainable bonds seem to have taken off over the last decade or so but blue bonds, designed to support sustainable marine and fisheries projects, have not.
Some suggest that the blue debt market is where the green bond space was 12 years ago, with the green bond space valuing $2trn.
From 2018, when the Seychelles issued the first blue bond, to 2022, there were only 26 blue bonds, with a cumulative value of approximately $5bn, representing less than 0.5% of the sustainable debt market, according to a paper from the University of Colombia’s Pieter Bosmans and Frederic de Mariz.
This feature can be read in the first issue of NZI Spark below
