Green Bond as the Instrument to Finance Carbon Neutrality

One of the obligations included in the European Green Deal (European Commotion [EC], 2019) is that the EU will achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.To ensure this goal, it is necessary to obtain and subsequently allocate sufficient financial resources.One of the options for providing/ensuring enough resources is the so-called green bond.Green bonds are used to finance projects with a positive environmental impact, especially in the field of renewable energy and energy efficiency.Paper's objective(s) and research background: Therefore, the main objective of this article is to characterize green bonds at the general level, and the second one is to describe their differences in yield compared to conventional (non-green) bonds at the theoretical level.The third objective is to evaluate the development of green bond issues based on the available data from the Climate Bonds Initiative for the period of 2014 to 2023 with focus on the amount of the issued bond in developed and emerging countries, as well as according to the use of proceeds like energy, buildings, transport or land use.Data/Methods: Within the aim to provide the Comprehensive Analysis of green bonds in a broader sense, the Conceptual Analysis was used, which is aimed at understanding the conceptual boundaries and semantics related to the object of research.The article used data from the free Climate Bonds Initiative website from 2014 to 2023.Based on the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test, we investigated whether there are statistically significant differences between the regions of Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America in the structure of issued bonds according to the use of proceeds for the entire period under review. Results/Conclusions/Value added:The results show that the green bonds belong to debt sources of financing without the possibility for their holders to participate directly in the management of the company that issued these bonds.Investors were often willing to buy these green bonds at higher prices compared to standard bonds, so their yield was lower and therefore more advantageous to the issuers themselves.This often resulted in the misuse of the term "green bond", and we speak about the so-called greenwashing.Therefore, there are currently several initiatives at the international level to determine the standards, so that it will be possible to clearly classify the bonds as "green" or "non-green".