European Green Deal and sustainable development: The Green Bonds as an integrated intervention tool to support Agribusiness in Italy

Abstract

The European Green Deal is an extraordinary pact to pursue collective sustainable development. It identifies not only key aspects that delimit the new regulatory horizons envisaged by the European Union but also those that can support initiatives from a concrete point of view. Among them, green bonds play a strategic role. This work aims to investigate the state of the art of green bonds, one of the specific financial instruments that companies of a certain size operating in the agri-food sector could use to comply with an innovative development plan in a “green” key. In the first section of the paper, the qualitative and quantitative profiles of the European Green Deal are defined in order to better understand the objectives of this policy document for the diffusion of green innovation at the European level. More specifically, both the European regulatory profiles and the direct intervention that should affect the specific sector of agribusiness were defined. In the light of this doctrinal evidence, the second section is focused on the green bonds – able to play a key role in green development – by considering the current state of the art, their strengths and weaknesses especially in the agribusiness domain.