Green bonds gaining appeal, but for how long?

A few years ago, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which is a substantial pool of resources, thanks to the country’s control of about half of the North Sea’s oil reserves, announced it would no longer invest in environmentally unsound industries such as coal power, and would begin unwinding the unsustainable investments it already held. Although investment activism was certainly nothing new, Norway’s move involving one of the world’s largest and most stable investment funds brought the idea to mainstream attention.

A number of other governments and large institutional investors have since followed suit, and while the recognition that the climate-related moral hazards represented by some investments probably should not be ignored is by no means universal yet, it is growing.