Earth 1.1
Global Green Premium Bond
A sovereign-backed savings instrument for the green industrial transition.
The Global Green Premium Bond is a sovereign-backed retail savings instrument designed to fund the long-horizon infrastructure that conventional capital cannot reach. It adapts a seventy-year-old institutional model — the United Kingdom’s Premium Bond — to a new purpose: building the energy, industrial, and transmission systems that the green industrial transition requires.
§ 01The Instrument
A familiar mechanism, redirected to a new purpose.
The Global Green Premium Bond is a debt instrument. Bondholders lend money to the issuer and are entitled to repayment at face value on demand. What distinguishes it from a conventional bond is the form of return: instead of a fixed coupon, bondholders are entered into a periodic prize draw, with the prize fund equal to the interest the bond would otherwise have paid.
Capital is preserved. Across the full population of bondholders, the expected return is identical to the equivalent interest rate. For any individual holder, the return is probabilistic. The model has been operated in the United Kingdom by National Savings and Investments for seventy years, currently holding £120 billion in deposits from 24 million holders.
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Capital preservation
Bondholder capital is never at risk and is redeemable at face value on demand.
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Prize-draw return
Periodic draws distribute the interest equivalent as a small number of larger prizes rather than universal small payments.
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Ring-fenced proceeds
All capital raised is deployed into projects certified against the Australian Sustainable Finance Taxonomy or equivalent international standards.
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Sovereign backing
The participating sovereign provides the guarantee, defines eligibility, and receives a levy on every bond sold.
§ 02The Innovation
Sovereign Backing as a Service.
The GGPB introduces a new model for how sovereigns participate in capital instruments designed for national priorities. The participating government does not issue the bond, operate the distribution platform, or take the capital onto its balance sheet. Instead, the government provides four things: the guarantee on capital preservation, the framework defining what qualifies for proceeds deployment, a permanent seat on the governance committee, and a levy on every bond sold.
In return, the sovereign receives revenue from the levy rather than cost from the issuance, capital raised from bondholders rather than added to public sector debt, strategic deployment of household savings into national-priority infrastructure, and public participation in the transition at scale.
The instrument is operated by an arms-length entity under the framework the sovereign defines. The operator is responsible for distribution, technology, customer experience, and reporting; the sovereign provides the public-good architecture.
§ 03The Context
Why a new instrument, and why now.
The green industrial transition requires patient capital at horizons conventional finance does not provide. Private equity and venture capital operate on 5-to-10 year fund cycles. Commercial bank lending is constrained by tenor and credit appetite. Sovereign green debt is coupon-bearing and adds directly to public sector liabilities. Existing public investment vehicles are necessary but operate at a scale insufficient for the build-out that the transition demands.
Recent independent analysis from Mandala Partners and the Investor Group on Climate Change (December 2025), and from the McKell Institute (June 2026), has documented the same diagnosis from different angles: the existing capital architecture is structurally mismatched to the patient, catalytic, long-horizon capital needs of the transition.
The GGPB is one structural response. It mobilises a new capital source — household savings under sovereign guarantee — into a new deployment channel — long-horizon taxonomy-aligned infrastructure — without adding to public debt or substituting for existing public capital vehicles. It is designed to complement, not replace, the existing institutional architecture.
§ 04About Earth 1.1
A platform for institutional-grade carbon and nature assets.
Earth 1.1 is an Australia-based platform building institutional-grade investment instruments for carbon, nature, and the green industrial transition. The platform was established to develop financing pathways that conventional capital markets do not adequately serve. The Global Green Premium Bond is its flagship instrument.
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David McGovern
Co-Founder & CEO
David is the founder of McGovern Solutions, an advisory and delivery firm operating across Australian Defence and Government programmes. He brings programme design and stakeholder engagement experience across sovereign capability domains.
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James Wall
Co-Founder & Chief Financial Architect
James is a former senior banking executive with deep experience in capital markets, sovereign debt structuring, and institutional banking. He co-led the world's first blockchain bond issuance with the World Bank.
§ 05Contact
For institutional, policy, or media enquiries.
The Earth 1.1 team welcomes enquiries from institutional investors, policy practitioners, sustainable finance experts, and journalists. For substantive enquiries, please write to contact@earth1.one. We reply to credible enquiries within five business days.
A concise briefing note is available for download above. The full concept paper is provided to qualifying institutional, policy, or media counterparties under appropriate confidentiality arrangements.
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