China to step up financial support for green development

Chinese authorities have issued guidelines to strengthen the financial support for green and low-carbon development.

According to the document jointly released by several government departments including the People's Bank of China (PBOC), the country will basically build a world-leading financial support system for green development in the next five years and make policies more coordinated, effective and mature by 2035, with better resource allocation, risk management and market pricing.

China will formulate and introduce unified carbon accounting standards for financial institutions, and promote institutions and financing entities to make environmental information disclosure.

Efforts will be made to gradually expand the scope of trading entities suitable for the development of China's carbon market, increase credit support for green development and low-carbon transformation in energy, industry, transportation, construction and other fields, and support eligible enterprises to list at home and abroad for financing or refinancing.

The guidelines also put forward measures to improve laws and regulations, enhance green finance assessment and evaluation mechanisms, enrich relevant monetary policy tools, and deepen regional reform of green finance.

The PBOC said work will be done to incorporate climate change-related risks into the macro-prudential policy framework, and to encourage financial institutions to accordingly improve their risk-control systems and corporate governance frameworks.