Topic: finance

The global landscape of development finance is changing. Some formerly poor countries are becoming richer, and new, large-scale investors have entered the field. At the same time, the global community is becoming increasingly aware of the need to enhance social well-being and environmental sustainability. This working paper looks at different ways in which the World Bank has attempted to navigate this landscape with its safeguard policies. It provides lessons for the Bank and other institutions that are looking to encourage national ownership over the safeguard process while holding both themselves and governments accountable to minimum social and environmental standards.

Limiting global temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels will require billions of dollars in investments each year to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and shift to low-emissions development pathways. This report draws on the experiences of six developing countries to examine how public climate finance can help meet the significant investment needs of developing countries by creating attractive conditions for scaled-up investment in low-carbon energy. Building on lessons from the case studies, it provides a number of recommendations for international climate funds and institutions, in particular for the new Green Climate Fund.

This guide will help companies be better prepared as they seek to secure attractive external financing for energy efficiency improvements at their facilities in China. The guide can be used by industry, energy services companies, and financiers to achieve a smoother financing process and prompt more energy efficiency upgrades to be implemented.

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.

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

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.

Global companies are under increasing pressure to be energy efficient, from New York City to Shanghai. Financing has long been a barrier, but a variety of financing tools can help unlock capital flows. To help governments and business understand how they can leverage energy efficiency investment, we explain five public-private financing mechanisms.