FISF Organizes Joint “Shanghai Forum 2025 Green Finance Sub-forum”, Making Heavyweight Reports on Building an International Green Finance System | Info

Release time：2025-04-29    

FISF  April 29^th 2025 17:51  Shanghai

2 heavyweight reports, 11 distinguished guests, building an international green finance system to address global challenges, reformation and transformation

——Shanghai Forum 2025 Green Finance Sub-forum was successfully held

On April 25^th 2025, Shanghai Forum 2025 “Building an International Green Finance System to Address Global Challenges, Reformation and Transformation” Sub-forum organized jointly by Fudan International School of Finance, Fudan Institute of Green Finance and Fudan Institute of Insurance Application and Innovation and co-organized by United Nations Development Programme was successfully held at Shanghai International Convention Center. The forum released Progress Report on the Construction of China’s Green Finance System (2025) and Early-stage Progress of Natural Financial Information Disclosure (Shanghai) and invited 11 distinguished guests to give speeches. The conference was presided over by Shiyi Chen, Distinguished Professor at Fudan University, Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance and Director of Fudan Institute of Insurance Application and Innovation.

Group photo of attending guests

At the beginning of the conference, Professor Shiyi Chen gave a speech. He warmly welcomed all the attending guests and introduced the organizing units and cooperative units of this conference. He stated that in the context of increasingly severe global climate crisis and urgent economic low-carbon transformation, green finance had become a key pivot to promote sustainable development. In the meantime, sustainable development information disclosure is also a significant field for the construction of the global green finance system at present. The sub-forum focused on building a green finance system and disclosing nature-related financial information, aiming to achieve bidirectional breakthroughs both theoretically and practically.

Shiyi Chen

Distinguished Professor at Fudan University

Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance

The first stage of the conference was keynote speeches. Yanfei Ye, Former First-class Inspector at National Financial Regulatory Administration, Violante di Canossa, Chief Economist at UNDP China Representative Office, Shiyi Chen, Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance, Jorge Arbache, Professor in Economics at University of Brasilia, Gagan Sidhu, Director of Green Finance Research Center of Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), Qingquan Zhang, Professor at the Business School of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and other guests expressed their insights on issues of building a green finance system and promoting green low-carbon transformation and development. Zhiqing Li, Executive Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance, was the host on this stage.

Zhiqing Li, Executive Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance

Yanfei Ye, Former First-class Inspector at National Financial Regulatory Administration, gave a keynote speech entitled “Green Finance Assisting Energy Transformation”. He pointed out that currently the global energy transformation was stepping into a new stage, with the global renewable energy (including hydropower, wind energy and solar energy, and etc.) accounting for 32% among all the power generation in 2024 and the overall clean energy (including nuclear power) reaching up to 40% for the first time, setting a new historical high. China’s energy transformation has made new progress in various aspects like the cumulative installed capacity and power generation of renewable energy. To achieve energy transformation, a sound cost sharing or benefit adjustment mechanism is needed, along with a supporting energy price transmission mechanism, carbon market price adjustment mechanism, financial support mechanism and monetary policy tool support mechanism. Besides, he emphasized that energy transformation should be fair and just, which requires global, national/regional, enterprise/project measures respectively to intensify the support of green finance for centralized and distributed renewable energy projects, energy storage projects and transmission and distribution projects, fugitive methane resource utilization, energy efficiency-oriented technological upgrades, as well as energy-saving renovations of existing buildings and green buildings. In the end, he proposed to pay attention to the construction of sustainable energy infrastructure in the global South, promote cooperation between governments, industry regulatory authorities, financial regulators, and private sectors, and stimulate the integration of energy industry and technical standards.

Yanfei Ye, Former First-class Inspector at National Financial Regulatory Administration

Violante di Canossa, Chief Economist at UNDP China Representative Office, made a speech entitled “From Green to Sustainable Finance for the SDGs: The Role of International Organizations”. She indicated that currently only 17% of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) internationally demonstrate sufficient progress that can be achieved by 2030. There was unbalanced development among different countries or regions, among which the Asian-Pacific region outperformed other regions around the world for most goals while displaying significant regression for SDG13 Climate Action Goals. Accordingly, she came up with some development opportunities and essential instruments from the perspective of UNDP. Firstly, UNDP is facilitating the construction of State-sponsored Integrated National Financing Frameworks and involving interested parties including both public and private sectors to participate, enabling them to play an important role in national and international financing for low-carbon development. Secondly, in September 2024, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and UDNP jointly released the world’s first international guidelines (ISO/UNDP PAS 53002), aiming to help enterprises and organizations to accelerate contributions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Thirdly, it released reports on SDG Impact Standards and the SDG Finance Taxonomy.

Violante di Canossa, Chief Economist at UNDP China Representative Office

Shiyi Chen, Distinguished Professor at Fudan University and Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance, made a report entitled “Progress Report on Building China’s Green Finance System”. In the beginning, he introduced the developing situation of the global green finance construction system. Currently, with global sustainable information disclosure policies and guidance constantly improving and the global green finance market represented by green and sustainable theme bonds constantly expanding, the global carbon emission trading market has grown rapidly, showing a trend of multidimensional expansion. Subsequently, he unveiled the achievements of China’s green finance system in five aspects of regulations and standards, information disclosure, products and markets, incentive and restraint mechanisms as well as international cooperation. For the regulations and standards, the green finance policy system in China has been gradually perfected from 2016 to 2025. By comparing the Guidelines for Building the Green Financial System (2016) with the Guidelines on Further Strengthening Financial Support for Green and Low-Carbon Development (2024), it can be identified that the definition of green finance has upgraded from “the narrow sense” to “a generalized concept”. In addition, local green finance practices have also made remarkable progress. For information disclosure, right now the sustainable information disclosure system is strengthened step by step, and practices in this aspect have also achieved positive results, with corporate ESG report disclosure rate and environmental information disclosure quality evidently increased. For products and markets, we can see increasingly large scales of green credit, green bond and green insurance markets, along with great efficacy in carbon market construction, climate investment and financing pilots. For incentive and restraint mechanisms, the nation has refined the top-level design of relevant policies while local governments have actively explored differentiated and precise implementation path; with innovative and abundant policy tools for the incentive and restraint mechanisms, distinguished effects can be spotted in the green project library construction and the implementation of supervision and assessment system. For international exchange and cooperation, cooperation with international organization, overseas product issuance and inter-government collaboration are all underway. According to the evaluation indicator system analysis constructed by the research team, the overall score of China’s green finance system construction has steadily increased in the past three years, among which the dimension of regulations and policies scores the highest, the dimension of safeguard measures has witnessed a huge leap forward and the market vitality has been rising. At last, he mentioned that China needed to continue perfecting and optimizing its green finance system, including enhancing a “nationally unified, internationally integrated, clear and executable” green finance standard system; intensifying ESG and sustainable information disclosure, gradually unifying disclosure frameworks and standards and consolidating enforcement and supervision; conducting product and service market system construction in green finance sub-sectors involving carbon finance, transformation finance, climate investment and financing, biodiversity finance; fortifying relevant guarantee measures from perspectives of financial and taxation policies, talent polities, risk prevention policies and supporting reward and punishment policies; strengthening green finance risk management, encouraging financial institutes to include climate-related risks into their risk control systems and governance frameworks, and exploring nature-related risk recognition and management; furthering international exchange and cooperation on green finance and reinforcing the green finance international cooperation mechanism.

Shiyi Chen

Distinguished Professor at Fudan University

Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance

Jorge Arbache, Professor in Economics at University of Brasilia, gave a speech entitled “Decarbonization and Trade: Challenges and Opportunities”. He noted that the global climate crisis at present was extremely urgent, but due to a lack of a sense of urgency, climate actions taken by different countries were quite unbalanced. Developing countries are experiencing great difficulty in trying to acquire capital and technology. In developed economies faced with issues of bureaucratism, taxation and public debts. The public has reacted negatively towards climate policies, which has made it even harder to achieve the overall decarbonization agenda. On the other hand, the means of trade could accelerate decarbonization efforts by utilizing economic contact and comparative advantages, strategically transferring energy-intensive industries to places already equipped with clean and green energy and thus achieving the goal of decarbonization in an economic and secure way. Through a detailed analysis on the examples of green steel and sustainable aviation fuel in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Professor Jorge implied that certain trade-driven decarbonization channels contributed a lot to achieving the goal of sustainable development and further stimulate global efficiency increase and value sharing. Moreover, he said that as trade could provide an effective platform to develop cooperative partnership and green diplomacy, China and Brazil should work together hand in hand and jointly handle challenges of tariffs, green protectionism and capital mismatch, playing a leading role in various fields.

Jorge Arbache

Professor in Economics at University of Brasilia

Gagan Sidhu, Director of Green Finance Research Center of Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), gave a speech entitled “Green Finance: Perspectives from India”, sharing the latest progress of India’s green finance. Currently nearly 50% of installed capacity in India comes from renewable energy; ever since 2023, India has issued Sovereign Green Bonds of over 8 billion dollars. However, a huge funding gap still exists in terms of mitigation and adaptation. In conclusion, right now India needs 50 billion dollars of investment annually for climate crisis mitigation and 15 billion dollars of investment for climate change adaptation; and nearly two thirds of the funds for mitigation come from private sectors and one third from public sectors while basically all the funds for adaptation come from public sectors. Other than this, it is also undergoing several challenges in the liquidity, cost and scale of green finance development.

Gagan Sidhu

Director of Green Finance Research Center of Council on Energy

Qingquan Zhang, Professor at the Business School of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, made a sharing entitled “Generative Al Integration in Identifying Contextual Sustainability Factors”. He remarked that lately his research team was devoted to addressing the inconsistent sustainable information disclosure among countries and regions with generative AI. By systematically analyzing and summarizing the ESG indicators of listed enterprises, generative AI can get a comprehensive score for an enterprise and make evaluation and prediction upon its finance and ESG performance through summary and analysis on the score. In the end, he advised that governments could selectively combine some AI techniques and indicators in supervision as AI was able to reduce misjudgment caused by subjective evaluation of mankind.

Qingquan Zhang

Professor at the Business School of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

After the wonderful speeches of the six guests, Shiyi Chen, Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance, and Dr. Chaode Ma, Assistant China Representative at UNDP China Representative Office, jointly released the research report, Early-stage Progress of Natural Financial Information Disclosure (Shanghai), which was completed by Fudan Institute of Green Finance under the support of the United Nations Development Programme. The report summarized the progress acquired in natural financial information disclosure in Shanghai and presented suggestions and prospects in the next step.

Release of Early-stage Progress of Natural Financial Information Disclosure (Shanghai)

The second stage of the conference was about the construction of natural financial information disclosure capacity and roundtable dialogue. Chaode Ma, Assistant China Representative at UNDP China Representative Office, Zhiqing Li, Executive Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance, Sen Chen, Deputy General Manager of Pacific Property Insurance, Dongwen Hu, Senior Engineer at Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences, Gagan Sidhu, Director of Green Finance Research Center of Council on Energy, participated in the discussion. The conference was presided over by Ms. Fei Leng, National Coordinator/Project Director of Biodiversity Finance Project (BIOFIN), UNDP China Representative Office.

Fei Leng

National Coordinator/Project Director of Biodiversity Finance Project (BIOFIN), UNDP China Representative Office

Chaode Ma, Assistant China Representative at UNDP China Representative Office, asserted that humans in today’s world are standing at the crossroads in history - when the world economy is on a journey of weak recovery and difficult progress; the earth is suffering a severe climate crisis; the biodiversity issue becomes pressing; geopolitical game worsens; the population structure is facing intensive changes; and a technology revolution featuring artificial and big data is reshaping the economic and social development pattern. Against such background, Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) is just one of the breakthrough points, which guides enterprises and financial institutes to disclose their reliance and influence of the nature and inspires them to include “lucid waters and lush mountains” in balance sheets, ensuring the co-frequency resonance between capital flow and ecological protection. As the founding partner of TNFD, UNDP is pushing forward three actions globally: firstly, conducting natural disclosure preparation research in ten countries like Mexico and India and customizing localized schemes; secondly, cooperating with the Central Bank and National Financial Regulatory Administration in China to include biodiversity finance into the Several Provisions on Green Finance Development in Pudong New Area, Shanghai; and thirdly, demonstrating that natural investment can bring economic return as high as 7:1 through “benefit sharing of genetic resources”, “marine protected area” and other relevant projects. Ultimately, he called on all walks of life to work together to transfer the nature from “the cost of silence” into “value-added capital” and TNFD from “a framework text” into an action plan.

Chaode Ma

Assistant China Representative at UNDP China Representative Office

Zhiqing Li, Executive Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance, gave a detailed introduction of the contents of the research report, Early-stage Progress of Natural Financial Information Disclosure (Shanghai), dividing it into four parts of “research background”, “policy and regulation progress of natural financial information disclosure in Shanghai”, “market practice progress of natural financial information disclosure in Shanghai” and “suggestions on natural information disclosure in Shanghai”. According to him, so far there have been huge risks and challenges at physical, transformation and natural system levels globally. In the grand context of increasing global attention on natural information disclosure, Shanghai wishes to advance natural information disclosure based on the coupling relationship between the natural society and economy. For regulations and policies, the Several Provisions on Green Finance Development in Pudong New Area, Shanghai emphasized taking environmental protection and environmental information disclosure as a key green finance standard and appealed to financial institutes to respond to both international and domestic initiatives upon biodiversity finance, and to participate in biodiversity finance demonstration projects on the basis of the international green finance cooperation framework. Other documents, such as Shanghai Stock Exchange Self-Regulatory Guidelines No.14 for Listed Companies - Sustainability Reporting (Provisional) and Shanghai Stock Exchange Self-Regulatory Guide No. 4 for Listed Companies - Sustainability Report Preparation, have also included “ecological system and biodiversity protection” into environmental issues. Generally, Shanghai has made certain progress in building natural information disclosure policies and regulations, but still has difficulty in promoting standards, data, incentive and restraint mechanisms. For market practice, Shanghai enterprises have taken active steps in ensuring natural information disclosure, but still they need to keep on studying, learning from international experience and improving their capabilities and levels of natural information disclosure in the process of overcoming difficulties and challenges. Overall, further exploration and revision in the three aspects of system construction, policy coordination and enterprise practice are still needed for the work of natural information disclosure in Shanghai.

Zhiqing Li

Executive Director of Fudan Institute of Green Finance

Sen Chen, Deputy General Manager of Pacific Property Insurance, made a sharing from two perspectives of “ESG information disclosure practice of China Pacific Insurance” and “innovative practice of natural risk protection of China Pacific Property Insurance”. As a leading ESG company in China, China Pacific Insurance has coordinated different voluntary frameworks and standards whenever possible, displaying in disclosing reports like Sustainability Report and Climate Response Report the latest progress in climate governance, strategic actions, risk management and target indicators in the broad sense. Also acting as the “buffer” for natural risk response, insurance institutes can provide support in buffer human-animal conflicts, protecting full-ecological spatial resources and ecological construction. For now Pacific Property Insurance is carrying out multiple forward-looking research projects and keeps exploring public welfare practice, advertising relevant innovative practices on mainstream media, official Weibo accounts, the official website of the company and other platforms to comprehensively involve the public to a larger extent in biodiversity protection.

Sen Chen,

Deputy General Manager of Pacific Property Insurance

Dongwen Hu, Senior Engineer at Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences, talked about the progress in biodiversity protection from the angle of the government. Currently the Shanghai Municipal Government has made all-round disclosure on relevant public platforms about nature reserves and local species in Shanghai as well as relevant capital expenditure, which is of great help to research biodiversity. By contrast, enterprises and market entities are showing relatively lower capacities of information disclosure, presenting a small number of biodiversity-related reports among all the enterprise ESG reports and certain misunderstandings of the specific elements of biodiversity. In the future, the Shanghai Government will attach importance to issuing natural information disclosure indicators, encouraging enterprises to publicize biodiversity-related information so that the public can conduct corresponding supervision.

Dongwen Hu,

Senior Engineer at Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences

Gagan Sidhu, Director of Green Finance Research Center of Council on Energy, stated that there existed divergence in understanding natural financial information disclosure between financial institutes and enterprises, and thus they should adopt a disclosure mode more suitable for their own way of operation when making relevant information disclosure. In terms of the information disclosure mode, India mainly employs a regulatory-driven approach. He urged that enterprises should be stimulated to make natural financial information disclosure, which would form a better virtuous circle if returns on shareholder value could be brought about in turn.

Gagan Sidhu

Director of Green Finance Research Center of Council on Energy

The conference focused on exploration on building a green finance system and the development situations, opportunities and challenges of natural financial information disclosure in different countries and regions, providing reference and support for relevant policy formulation.