‘Very valuable’ role for Hong Kong in helping UN body reach green finance goals

Hong Kong can play a role in helping the UN achieve its sustainability and humanitarian goals through green financing, the head of innovative finance at its refugee agency has said.

Siddhartha Sinha also said that developing “good partnerships” would help Hong Kong as it looked to tap into Islamic financing, citing the agency’s own experience.

Sinha was speaking to the Post on the sidelines of the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) Global Conference in Hong Kong on Wednesday. AVPN pitches itself as the largest network of social investors in Asia.

Sinha, the head of innovative finance at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said that over the past five years, the agency had been expanding beyond its traditional funding model of raising grants from governments towards one that included other forms of financing such as carbon markets.

The traditional funding model had become “inadequate” to deal with the number of issues the agency was expected to solve, he said, with UN statistics estimating the number of displaced people in the world had grown to more than 120 million in 2024.

“So if we can, from our perspective, connect carbon markets to these programmes, you get … not just the environmental impact, but a lot of social impact on the communities that are affected,” he said.