China’s US$6.8 trillion green finance boom to advance further

[BEIJING] Growth in China’s green finance sector has accelerated over the past decade and the balances now total about US$6.8 trillion, said a former adviser to the nation’s central bank.

Ma Jun, former member of the monetary policy committee of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), said that the value of outstanding green financing, covering green bonds, loans and equities, has jumped from around US$1 trillion in 2015.

He is the founder and president of the Beijing-based Institute of Finance and Sustainability.

“By far, this is the largest green finance system in the world,” he noted on Wednesday (Jan 28), speaking at a United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative online event.

Growth in the sector is likely to remain strong, said Ma, who has led the development of key policies. 

High-level policy guidance from Beijing in 2016, approved by President Xi Jinping, helped to kick off the boom.

And it sent a signal that China’s government and “all levels of officials ... are actually watching if you are behaving in the right way, to assist the country in the greening of the financial system, as well as the economy”, Ma said. 

The growth in green financing has also supported China’s rise to dominance in green manufacturing, including batteries, solar panels and wind turbines, “because all of these are actually very capital-intensive industries”, he added.

Ma’s forecast of China’s balances is measured against a calculation by the European Union’s Platform on Sustainable Finance, which points to a total outstanding green debt in Europe of 1.7 trillion euros (S$2.6 trillion) at the end of 2023.

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China had a record US$140.6 billion in green bond issuance in 2025, based on data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence.

The nation’s first green sovereign bond sale also raised six billion yuan (S$1.1 billion), to fund activities including climate change mitigation, biodiversity preservation and pollution control.

The advance of green finance in China is spurred by a growing body of dozens of national policies supporting the sector.

In October, the PBOC and the country’s financial regulators released a new project catalogue to standardise the rules across green finance products. BLOOMBERG