Topic: climate finance

This working paper is part of WRI’s Climate Finance Series, which tackles a broad range of issues relevant to public donors, intermediaries, and recipients of climate finance. A subset of this series, including this working paper, examines how public funds can leverage private sector investment in climate-relevant projects to help meet developing countries’ significant investment needs. This paper maps climate-relevant investments of select multilateral agencies – the World Bank Group, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the Clean Technology Fund (CTF) – to identify trends in their investment practices. Subsequent working papers will map the activities of other public institutions. The aggregated findings will be synthesized into recommendations that inform the future public provision of climate finance with respect to leveraging private sector capital.

Japan’s fast-start finance (FSF) commitment is one of the largest amongst developed countries, but it is important to consider the contents of this commitment. Japan has played a significant role in global efforts to finance climate change activities in developing countries, and its FSF commitments account for almost half of the FSF that developed countries have pledged for 2010-2012. However, it is essential to better understand the broad range of instruments and activities that the government includes in its FSF, as different governments consider different types of finance to constitute FSF, so self-reported figures are not directly comparable between countries.

WRI’s preliminary analysis on countries’ immediate “fast start” climate finance pledges announced thus far.

2011/2012 was a transition period as WRI said goodbye to President Jonathan Lash and welcomed new President Andrew Steer. With ample wind in our sails from 18 years of Jonathan’s leadership, the Institute’s accomplishments—many captured in this report—reflect both the strength and versatility he instilled in the organization.

Building the capacity of developing countries to monitor climate finance received will ultimately require the modification, development, and adoption of tools, methods, and processes. This paper explores the challenges faced by Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam in monitoring finance for climate change. It also attempts to understand capacity gaps and develop insights about what can be done to improve climate finance monitoring.

This document provides a glossary of financing instruments and the mechanism of these instruments. These definitions may serve as a useful reference for public sector decision-makers evaluating the broad toolkit of options available to support private sector climate change mitigation projects in developing countries.

These tables provide examples of donor government, development bank, research organization, and private sector efforts that examine how to use public climate finance to leverage private capital for climate change mitigation projects in developing countries. These tables are intended to illustrate, rather than exhaustively list, the range of research and convening initiatives focused on this topic. This document will periodically be updated as the landscape of such initiatives is dynamic and shifts periodically.

This document provides an array of relevant papers, publications, and resources that address: 1) Using Public Resources to Leverage Private Sector Participation; 2) Types of Public Financing Instruments and Mechanisms; and 3) Other Contextual Publications. These reading resources represent the current span of literature in climate finance as it relates to the private sector and can be reviewed to enhance one’s understanding of the nuanced opportunities and challenges presented by climate finance. This document will periodically be updated as organizations continue to publish in this space.

Targeting public finance to leverage private sector capital can help meet the several hundred billion dollars of annual low-carbon investment required in developing countries. This working paper serves as a primer, demonstrating how the public sector can employ different types of public financing instruments — whether loans, equity, or de-risking instruments — alongside policy and technical support to scale-up private sector investment in low-carbon markets.