Green Finance is heralded in theory and practice as the new panacea - the ideal way to support the green transition of businesses into more sustainable, environmentally responsible forms, by means of incentivized financial investments. This handbook offers the most authoritative overview of Green Finance to date, presenting the state of the art, and including innovative directions from leading academics and practitioners. It focuses on Green Finance in a comprehensive way, discussing its characteristics, underlying principles and mechanisms. The book carefully illuminates the issues surrounding Green Finance and delineate its boundaries, mapping out and displaying the disparate voices, traditions and professional communities engaged in green and sustainable finance activities. Specifically, it examines the Environmental in the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) measurements, while also discussing the interplay between E, S and G. It develops a range of analytic approaches to the subject, both appreciative and critical, and synthesizes new theoretical constructs that make better sense of hybrid financial relationships. Furthermore, the handbook illustrates existing best practice and theory and examines the gaps to derive the necessary future research questions. It highlights the essential issues and debates and provides a robust research agenda. As such, it helps to create an effective market for the various green financing instruments through clarification and standardization. This handbook will be the standard reference work for a broad audience, encompassing scholars, researchers and students, but also interested professionals, regulators and policymakers, wishing to orient themselves in a rapidly developing and increasingly topical field.

This book reviews the latest methods of sustainable investing and financial profit making and describes how ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) analysis can identify future business opportunities and manage risk to achieve abnormal returns. Megatrends such as climate change, sustainable development and digitalisation increase uncertainty and information asymmetry and have an impact on the future returns on investments. From a profit perspective, it is largely about how ESG factors affect the long-term value added by companies and the valuation of companies in the financial markets. Although sustainability provides an opportunity for abnormal returns, this phenomenon must be considered in a critical light. The book describes the risks and limitations associated with the accountability and availability of ESG data and tools. This book provides both academic findings and practical models for assessing the sustainability of investees and introduces practical tools and methods to make ESG analysis practice. It focuses on the ESG analysis of equity investments and fund investments in institutional investment organizations and provides a handbook for all investment analysts who are involved with investment decisions. Readers will benefit from understanding the methods, opportunities and challenges that professionals use in their ESG analysis with cases, interviews and practical tools for both institutional and private investors.