Author: Oche, Jr. (Alex)
Publisher:
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 91
ISBN-13:
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Nigeria issued its first sovereign green bond in December 2017, being the first African country to issue sovereign green bonds and the fourth sovereign to issue green bonds in the world. Due to the successful issuance and recorded oversubscription of the sovereign green bond, and also her ambitions to meet her Nationally Determined Contribution set out in the recently signed Paris Agreement, she has decided to open the green bond market to private sector participant, by promulgating the Securities and Exchange Commission's Green Bond Rules 2018, consequently permitting corporate green bond issuances. Therefore the central aim of this work is to examine the provisions of the SEC Green Bond Rules against international best practices in order to ascertain its parity with global best standards. In this work, expository, analytical and comparative jurisprudence have been carried out with the help of relevant international standard guidelines and regulations on green bonds. The work examined the Green Bond Principles and the Climate Bonds Standard, the two most popular international green bond guidelines. The study also focused on a comparative analysis of green bond regulatory regimes of Nigeria, Philippines and China. Part of the findings of this work is that that the Green Bond Principles and the Climate Bonds Standard form the foundation of most jurisdictions' green bond regulations, and that the climate bonds standard is more strict in ensuring compliance with post issuance green standards, a factor which is very vital to the success or otherwise of green bonds. The work also discovered that jurisdictions whose green bond regulations are modelled after the Climate Bonds Standard tend to do better in terms of transparency and green project impact monitoring due to their strict regulations and policing mechanisms when compared to Nigeria's green bond regulation. The work concludes that if green bonds are to be utilised as a veritable tool for sustainable investments, the SEC green bond rules should be amended to require compulsory assessment and verification of post-issuance impact assessment reports by independent verifiers or certification agencies, as this will afford the public to have second party expert opinion on the progress of green bonds and achieved green project impacts, while ensuring transparency and curbing fraudulent practices.
