Environmental Finance: A Guide to Environmental Risk Assessment and Financial Products: 98 (Wiley Finance) - Tapa dura

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SONIA LABATT is an associate faculty member at the Institute of Environmental Studies (IES), University of Toronto. She is actively engaged with the financial services world as an investor, and the academic world of environmental finance through a graduate-level course that she has developed and taught since 1996, "Corporate Perspectives on the Environment."

RODNEY R. WHITE is Director of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IES), University of Toronto. His experience includes environmental consulting work for clients such as the World Bank, UNESCO, the Canadian International Development Agency, and the United States Agency for International Development. During 1999-2000, he was an Associate Fellow of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, where he offered a graduate course, "The Financial Services Sector and Environmental Change." His most recent books include North, South and the Environmental Crisis, Urban Environmental Management (Wiley), and Building the Ecological City.

De la contraportada

"Environmental Finance provides a thorough, objective discussion of the environmental risk issues facing financial institutions and how to effectively manage both the challenges and opportunities they present. A very current, informative and comprehensive reference."
-James R. Evans, Manager, Environmental Risk Management
RBC Financial Group

Today, environmentally irresponsible companies run the risk of hurting their bottom line as well as their image. As a result, environmental risk is reshaping the way insurance companies underwrite to corporate clients, banks lend, investors invest, and companies operate. Banks and insurance companies are also developing new environmental financial products to help their corporate customers protect their bottom line against changes in environmental legislation and the impact of adverse weather and climate change.

Environmental Finance: A Guide to Environmental Risk Assessment and Financial Products is one of the first books to explore this emerging field. This comprehensive reference opens with a discussion of the concepts and tools used by financial institutions to develop environmental policies and products, and then details how recent changes in the financial services sector have affected the capacity of companies to respond to the environmental challenge. From here you'll learn about innovative new products such as tradable pollution permits, weather derivatives, catastrophe bonds, and many other market-based solutions that are being created in response to every type of environmental problem-from hurricanes to asbestos.

The financial and social consequences of environmental risk will continue to grow. Learn how to hedge these risks and come out on top with Environmental Finance as your guide.

De la solapa interior

The emerging world of environmental finance has allowed modern industrial society to approach the environmental challenges of today and tomorrow in a profitable and positive manner. Environmental Finance: A Guide to Environmental Risk Assessment and Financial Products is one of the first books to cover this expanding field-a field that encompasses all market-based instruments designed to deliver environmental quality and transfer environmental risk.

Environmental experts Sonia Labatt and Rodney White present an engaging and comprehensive look at the intersection of financial innovation with the environment. Through real-world case studies, industry insights, and timely advice, this book provides the strategies, techniques, and financial products that you as a financial service professional or corporate executive must understand in order to improve a company's environmental performance. In addition, Environmental Finance serves as an important source of information for concerned citizens and independent investors regarding proactive environmental corporate behavior patterns and environmentally enhanced financial products and investment strategies.

You'll gain a firm understanding of the concepts and tools used by financial institutions to develop environmental policies and products, and learn how recent changes in the financial services sector-globalization, deregulation, and technological innovation-have affected the capacity of companies to respond to the environmental challenge.

After this general foundation has been established, core financial services provided by commercial and investment banks as well as insurance companies are explored, along with their areas of environmental exposure. Environmental Finance also examines the investment and risk transfer opportunities created by new financial products. In-depth coverage of each topic reveals new products and services with environmental and social-centered themes, including:
* Banking products such as green mortgages
* Insurance for cost cap overruns for cleaning up polluted sites
* Weather derivatives to hedge exposure to adverse weather
* Catastrophe bonds for earthquakes and weather risks
* The beginning of markets for greenhouse gas-reduction credits
* Screening processes that have been used to develop socially and environmentally acceptable investment products
* And much more

Environmental Finance also examines other important issues that will continue to challenge financial institutions and their clients in the years ahead, including climate change and the attempt to develop a common methodology for environmental reporting. By integrating these discussions with the lessons drawn from real-world case studies and examples, this book will clearly help you understand and adapt to the environmental challenges that lie ahead.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, people assumed that there was an implicit trade-off between economic growth and an attractive environment. After reading Environmental Finance, you'll see how far we've come from this archaic notion and learn how to manage environmental risk by utilizing a variety of different financial products and strategies.