Including a climate justice viewpoint into the green bonds pre-issuance process

Climate change, and how to tackle the problems generated by it, are arguably the most pressing issues to be addressed in the Anthropocene era. However, climate change adaptation and mitigation projects required to build or renovate the infrastructure towards climate change bring hefty financial burdens. The current international narrative is that those resources cannot be provided by public funding alone; therefore, private finance should be engaged in the task as well. Consequently, the sustainable finance market was born. Within that market, green bonds are the preferred financial instrument to engage in the task of funding climate change adaptation and mitigation projects worldwide. However, the green bond pre-issuance process has extensive financial and procedural requirements that are not necessarily consistent throughout geographies. Even more, the justice of this process has, as of yet, never been questioned. In this paper I follow the research question of ‘why should green bonds have climate justice at the core of their pre-issuance process?’ by first showcasing how the neoliberal environmentalism governance has set-up the basis for green bonds to emerge and become the preferred financial instruments for funding projects related to mitigating and adapting to climate change. The paper then explains the green bonds pre-issuance process at large; followed by a comparison of the green bonds pre-issuance process in four regions and one country, namely Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and China, with the pre-issuance process recommended by the International Capital Markets Association and the Climate Bonds Initiative. Finally, this paper discusses how climate justice can be integrated into the green bonds pre-issuance process and elaborates on how the different justices embedded in climate justice could act as catalyzers for a just development as a way to move forward.