Generally speaking, assessing the attractiveness of impact-oriented bonds (IOBs), including green, blue and social impact bonds, revolves around two aspects: understanding the financial opportunity of the investment and recognizing its expected environmental and social (E&S) benefits and outcomes.
Tobago is renowned for its sandy beaches, great weather, beautiful tropical landscapes, and friendly people. But the island is also home to transcendent nature-based assets such as the internationally known Buccoo Reef and the Tobago Main Ridge Forest Reserve, the oldest legally protected forest reserve in the western hemisphere. All of these characteristics will be key to a successful sustainable, and resilient post-COVID-19 recovery.
When we design development projects, our objective is always to improve lives. Ideally, this objective can be achieved with minimal to no negative externalities. However, on occasion and even after careful consideration of the alternatives, direct or indirect adverse impacts on some groups cannot be completely avoided and must instead be responsibly managed to ensure that project-affected people are not worse off because of an IDB-financed operation. This is the case of involuntary resettlement.
A product of decades of industrialization, urbanization, and motorization, chronic severe air pollution is now a global phenomenon. Today, 90 percent of the world’s people live in places that do not meet World Health Organization (WHO) air quality standards. The consequences for human health have been grave. Each year, air pollution causes 5 to 9 million premature deaths and many more cases of bronchitis, asthma, and other cardiopulmonary illnesses.
“A 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperature would be a ‘death sentence’ for island and coastal communities”, Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley said during a powerful speech at the World Leaders Summit on the second day of the 26th UN climate summit (COP26) in Glasgow.
Mottley highlighted how failure to provide critical climate finance to small island developing states (SIDS) at the frontline of climate change is measured in the lives and livelihoods of their communities. She urged world leaders to increase ambitions and “try harder”.
A central theme of the talks at the Glasgow climate summit is how countries can mobilize the private sector to finance decarbonization.In a workshop that the IDB group organized with Fundación Chileyesterday, we discussed some solutions – beyond green financial regulations, concessional climate funds, and carbon markets – that are often overlooked in international conversations.
Nature and biodiversity are taking center stage as a critical theme at COP26 in Glasgow.
I was born in Montreal, and I have early memories of whizzing around the city on the metro system with my mother. When I was in the first grade, we moved to a new province, to a smaller town with a slower pace, and we got around by car, foot, or bus. Living in the suburbs, I remember the fear of missing the last bus and having to take a long walk from the bus stop. This smaller town has now grown into a large urban sprawl and the bus system has grown with it.
At the Inter-American Development Bank, we believe that the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean can improve the lives of their citizens while protecting the region’s abundant natural resources.
The climate crisis is underway and is increasingly getting hard to ignore. July 2021 joins the one in 2020 as the third warmest July on record globally. Brazil suffered from extremely low temperatures that sent international prices for coffee and sugar higher.