We focus on two core areas within sustainable finance:

Financing Green: Through WWF’s Bankable Nature Solutions initiative, we leverage Hong Kong’s position as an international financial centre to originate and arrange commercially viable investments with positive environmental and social impact, with funding sourced from private and/or public institutions.

Greening Finance: Together with the WWF global finance practice, we engage with institutional investors, lenders, underwriters, and finance sector influencers in Hong Kong and Asia-Pacific to improve their integration of environmental risks and opportunities, guiding their decisions and actions taken to contribute to environmental and conservation outcomes.

Each year, only US$1.7 trillion of the US$4.2 trillion needed annually to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is invested, mostly from public, philanthropic and governmental sources.  

Greater private-sector investment could potentially close this funding gap by more than half. But the private sector has traditionally been wary of investing in sustainable projects due to limited investment opportunities and their perceived risks, small sizes and relatively low returns. 

Bankable Nature Solutions (BNS) aims to mobilise private-sector investment into projects that not only build more sustainable, climate-resilient ecosystems for people, nature and economies, but are also financially viable enough to be scaled up and replicated, increasing both environmental and financial gains.  

The natural environment is essential to achieving the SDGs, providing vital resources that can be harnessed to create solutions to the challenges we face. But nature is being degraded at a rapid rate with alarming consequences. Sustainable finance is key to reversing this trend.

The global financial system enables economic activity that significantly impacts our planet. Together with WWF’s finance practice, the EFU can encourage a meaningful shift by influencing finance to improve integration of environmental risks; encouraging finance to deliver investment for sustainable development; and using the influence of finance in turn to drive sustainable practices through the economy.