‘Very valuable’ role for Hong Kong in helping UN body reach green finance goals Hong Kong can play a role in helping the UN achieve its sustainability and humanitarian goals through green financing, the head of innovative finance at its refugee agency has said. Siddhartha Sinha also said that developing “good partnerships” would help Hong Kong as it looked to tap into Islamic financing, citing the agency’s own experience. Sinha was speaking to the Post on the sidelines of the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) Global Conference in Hong Kong on Wednesday. AVPN pitches itself as the largest network of social investors in Asia. Sinha, the head of innovative finance at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said that over the past five years, the agency had been expanding beyond its traditional funding model of raising grants from governments towards one that included other forms of financing such as carbon markets. The traditional funding model had become “inadequate” to deal with the number of issues the agency was expected to solve, he said, with UN statistics estimating the number of displaced people in the world had grown to more than 120 million in 2024. “So if we can, from our perspective, connect carbon markets to these programmes, you get … not just the environmental impact, but a lot of social impact on the communities that are affected,” he said. Describing Hong Kong as one of the “premier financial centres of the world”, Sinha said the city had a “very valuable” role in helping the agency to bring together different players who could help provide financing. He highlighted the city’s ability to convene people at events such as the AVPN conference, which saw more than 1,550 delegates from 50 markets descend on the city for the three-day forum. “The convening is incredibly important, because many of these solutions simply won’t happen without [it],” he said. The city could also provide the technical and regulatory expertise needed to ensure projects such as the issuance of green bonds could get off the ground, he added. Hong Kong has been positioning itself as a global hub for green and sustainable finance in recent years. Hong Kong’s green bond issuance last year reached US$43 billion, representing 45 per cent of the total in Asia. The Monetary Authority, Hong Kong’s de facto central bank, also began a public consultation earlier this month on a proposed expansion of the city’s sustainable finance taxonomy to cover transition finance. Among the UNHCR’s new initiatives is a Green Financing Facility, which Sinha said was being used in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa to transition offices that ran on diesel generators to renewable energy. It has also launched a Refugee Environmental Protection Fund, which is using carbon credits to help with reforestation and clean cooking programmes in climate-vulnerable refugee situations around the world. Sinha said the fund was currently supporting two projects in Uganda and Rwanda, as well as conducting feasibility assessments in a number of other countries such as Bangladesh. Addressing worries about potential “greenwashing”, a term used to describe companies that abuse carbon offsetting such as by purchasing low-quality or unverifiable carbon credits, Sinha said it was also a concern for the agency. “We can’t fully eliminate any risk but … from our perspective we are essentially only interested in the impact, and I think that motivation matters,” he said. Sinha also said Hong Kong should look to building “good partnerships” to tap into sharia-compliant financing, pointing to the agency’s experience setting up the Global Islamic Fund for Refugees. The UNHCR launched the fund in 2023 in partnership with the Islamic Development Bank, headquartered in Saudi Arabia. The multilateral development bank focuses on Islamic finance and infrastructure projects. Sinha said the UNHCR now had a dedicated team that worked with mobilising Islamic philanthropy, which had developed “a certain fluency” with sharia compliance. “These things just can’t get off the ground unless you have the right partners,” he said. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/article/3325212/very-valuable-role-hong-kong-helping-un-body-reach-green-finance-goals (ICE HONG KONG)

Fonte notizia: South China Morning Post