Climate change, water, and air pollution create big challenges for the world community. The crucial importance of the environment is reflected in public debate and the actions of international organizations. The UN has prepared 2015 the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), emphasizing global warming problems, pollution problems, and poverty problems. Despite the growing importance, the acquisition of funding for the implementation of SDGs is an issue. It requires involving society, not only on an organizational level but also on a funding level. It seems crowdfunding builds a great opportunity to use it for projects that aim at sustainable development and environmental issues. This chapter discusses crowdfunding as a financial form for projects targeting green energy. In the first part, the bibliometric analysis was conducted covering the publications in the field of crowdfunding and sustainability. The second part presents the study directions and the most important conclusion from the literature studies. In the last part, the sustainability-oriented platforms are presented.
TopIntroduction
Climate change, water, and air pollution create big challenges for the world community. The crucial importance of the environment is reflected in public debate and the actions of international organizations. The UN (United Nation) has prepared 2015 the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), emphasizing global warming problems, pollution problems, and poverty problems. Despite the growing importance, the acquisition of funding for the implementation of SDGs is an issue. It requires involving society, not only on an organizational level but also on a funding level. It seems crowdfunding builds a great opportunity to use it for projects that aim at sustainable development and environmental issues. This chapter discusses crowdfunding as a financial form for projects targeting green energy. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the possibility of using equity crowdfunding as a form of financing green energy projects.
Basically crowdfunding originated as a form of fundraising for creative, innovative, and social projects in exchange for nonmonetary rewards (Hemer, 2011). It was used at the beginning for supporting some artistic events and as well for charity reasons. With time crowdfunding has developed, and it builds fundraising possibilities for various groups of entities (companies, non-governmental organizations, foundations, organizations, or private individuals). The entities can have access to funds using several crowdfunding models. In the literature, there are presented a variety of typologies for crowdfunding (Collins et al. 2013; Hemer, J. 2011, Bradford, C.S., 2012, Belleflamme, P., Lambert, T. 2016). Some authors distinguish three models (the donation model, the lending model, and the investment model), while others additionally separate donation-based crowdfunding without reward from reward-based crowdfunding, there are also typologies for different subcategories in investment crowdfunding. It seems that Shneor (2020) presents the typology, which is both consistent with earlier references and the approach of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, additionally, it is in line with the reality of crowdfunding platforms (Table 1).
Table 1. The typology of crowdfunding models
| Investment | Debt | P2P / Marketplace Consumer Lending |
| Balance Sheet Consumer Lending |
| P2P / Marketplace Business Lending |
| Balance Sheet Business Lending |
| P2P / Marketplace Property Lending |
| Balance Sheet Property Lending |
| Micro-Finance |
| Invoice trading | Invoice Trading |
| Equity | Equity Crowdfunding |
| Real Estate Crowdfunding |
| Debt-based Securities |
| Mini Bonds |
| | Profit-sharing Crowdfunding |
| Community Shares |
| Non-investment | Reward | Reward Crowdfunding |
| Donation | Donation Crowdfunding |
| Patronage |
Source: Sheor (2020).