Green finance training to be stepped up
Hong Kong’s financial sector and universities are working together to equip the city’s professionals with the knowledge and skills they need to tap the huge decarbonisation opportunities on the mainland, a Post webinar on green finance and environmental, social and governance (ESG) talent development has heard.
In the next 30 years, some 480 trillion yuan (HK$575 trillion) of green financing will be needed on the mainland to fund the transformation of its economy into one that is carbon-neutral by 2060, according to a report published last year by the green finance committee of the China Society for Finance and Banking.
“Even a small portion of that requires Hong Kong green finance services, and that will be enough to drive a huge increase in demand for talent,” Ma Jun, chairman of the committee as well as of the Hong Kong Green Finance Association, told the Redefining Hong Kong series webinar yesterday.
Around two-thirds of the green bonds issued in Hong Kong were used to fund projects on the mainland, he noted.
To meet demand, Hong Kong needs more green finance professionals who are well versed in the classification of projects that would qualify for environmentally friendly finance.
The Hong Kong Green Finance Association and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) would jointly launch a pilot six-module green finance and ESG investing course next month, Ma said.
Next year, Polytechnic University would launch a series of “upskilling” seminars to educate accounting professionals in the city on how to adopt green finance in capital-intensive projects, said professor Lu Haitian, co-director of the university’s Centre for Economic Sustainability and Entrepreneurial Finance.
More business school students would also be getting trained on sustainability issues, other panellists said.
“We have heard directly from employers that they want students who already have a ‘101’ grounding in sustainability and environmental issues [and the science involved],” said Christine Loh Kung-wai, chief development strategist of HKUST’s Institute for the Environment.
To that end, HKUST’s department of environment and sustainability, and its business and management school, will jointly offer an undergraduate sustainable and green finance programme with a first intake of 30 students this September.