Green Bond Reporting

Abstract

ARTICLE GREEN BOND REPORTING John Patrick Hunt* Are green bonds really “green”? A number of legal scholars have addressed various aspects of this critical question. How- ever, none has focused on issuers’ post-issuance assertions about what they spend the bond proceeds on and on the way those assertions are, or are not, verified. This paper is the first empirical study in legal scholarship of post-issuance reporting on the use of green-bond proceeds. Using a dataset from the Bloomberg service that covers all 155 dollar-denominated corporate green bonds from US corporate issuers in the period from mid-2019 to mid-2022, supple- mented by a Web review of reporting, the paper reports that almost 10% of green bonds appear to have no post-issuance re- porting and that around one third of the bonds lack reporting that is attested by a third party. Project-level attestation, the most detailed type, exists for around 30% of attested bonds and 20% of all US corporate green bonds. Much of the commentary on green-bond verification focuses on assessments by pre-issuance reviewers, building on an anal- ogy to credit rating agencies. But an important difference be- tween green-bond verification and credit rating is that *Professor of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research Scholar, Uni- versity of California, Davis School of Law (King Hall), jphunt@ucdavis.edu. Thanks to King Hall Dean Kevin Johnson and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Afra Afsharipour for institutional …

Source: pdf_first_chars