WE ARE GUERNSEY Deputy Chief Executive, Strategy, Guernsey Green Finance Chair Dr Andy Sloan outlines the island's commitment to sustainable finance.

Over the past 20 years, the value proposition in private wealth has changed beyond all recognition. Sustainable finance today is central to the private wealth agenda in a way that would have been unforeseeable at the turn of the millennium.

Sustainable finance itself has deep roots, the agenda of the UN's Brundtland Commission reaching out to us from the mountain of decades past to become what have been the 'tablets of stone' of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals – a list of 17 objectives for capital investment in the middle of the last decade. 

The serendipitous timing of events significant to the climate change movement – COP 21 in Paris in the same year and the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures – has created what was arguably a tipping point in 2015.

Guernsey made a key strategic commitment to the sustainability movement, with both government, industry and financial services regulator making separate commitments to strategic action, and is a member of several United Nations Environment Programme initiatives.  

As a result, Guernsey has been able to be at the forefront of the development of sustainable finance and, from the experience gained and its expertise in private wealth, has developed a thriving ecosystem of sustainable finance services.

We have transposed our leadership in the development of product and services in the funds sector – the Guernsey Green Fund being a world-first regulatory regime – to the private wealth space, and have quietly introduced several bespoke tools and services to the private wealth market.  

We spent much of 2020 evangelising the sustainability agenda and we look forward to discussing the progress made and the work still to be done at our 2021 Sustainable Finance Week in June.

This article first appeared in STEP Journal, Issue Six, 2020.

For more information about Guernsey's finance industry please visit www.weareguernsey.com.

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