Japan has always seemed to be at the forefront of technology.  As the world continues to embrace green technology and sustainability, they seem to be continually at the forefront of this world as well.

Japan has invested billions of dollars in the use of more sustainable systems and technologies and despite the huge metropolises present in Japan, they seem to be far ahead of most other countries in the world in regards to carbon emissions.  About a year ago, Japan announced a program that would stimulate the economy by investing in the green market and stimulating up to one million new jobs related to green.

In addition to the new jobs, the program involves no interest loans for sustainable companies.  The goal of these initiatives is to expand the sustainable environment business market to eleven billion dollars and increase sustainability related jobs to 2.2 million by the year 2015.

With such a strong focus on the environment in Japan, green investments continue to be an important part of government policy.  In general, a green investment would be classified as any type of traditional investment that is based on a company involved in sustainable practices.  There are many different ways to classify a company as sustainable, but regardless of this, the idea is to direct money towards companies with best environmental practices or a focus on improving the environment.

Any type of company can position itself as a green investment – a smaller start-up can work on releasing a new or improved product that has a positive effect on the environment and an existing larger company can reduce their footprint by investing in or creating sustainable energy sources for production.

An individual has many different options of how to invest in sustainable companies.  As classifying a company as green is still somewhat subjective, there are different green investing funds available that only include equity in companies that practice some amount of sustainability.  With public interest in sustainability constantly on the rise, green energy investment has actually proven to beat stock market indices such as the Dow Jones Industrial average in some cases.

A new type of green investment fund available in Japan is the green bonds issued by the World Bank.  These bonds will be available to investors as a safe way of investing their money in projects that they know will be related to sustainability.  This is a wonderful development because it allows more people to get involved in this without needing to take the risk generally associated with the stock market.

Even though most people hear sustainability discussed on a daily basis at this point, there are still many new developments on the subject and Japan is a great place to look for them.

Last Modified : March 3rd, 2010 Filed under : Finance Navigate : Previous post / Next post