Blog Posts: climate finance

The public financial institutions tasked with funding sustainable development worldwide have outlined a framework for aligning operations with the Paris agreement, but they need to start announcing when they'll move off unaligned projects, and how projects will qualify.

This guiding document should outline how the GCF will achieve 1.5-aligned ambition, approach adaptation, avoid watering down the quality of its programs, and empower developing country institutions.

Advocates of climate finance in Congress have spent the last three years on the defensive, working to maintain current levels of spending. But a rapid scale up of investment in climate action is urgently needed, and public finance plays a key role.

The demand for green bonds is high, but only 3-5% of the proceeds go to climate resilience. That's in part because there hasn't been a standard for how to evaluate whether a project will increase resilience to climate change — until now.

Sovereign parametric insurance can finance disaster response when extreme weather events like droughts or hurricanes cause emergencies in developing countries.

As developing countries increasingly experience the impacts of climate change, ensuring that they have efficient access to adaptation funding is ever more urgent. The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is one of the world’s largest sources of finance for climate adaptation, and importantly, most of its finance is concessional, meaning it is delivered with significant grant components. It is therefore essential that the GCF Board, which meets this weekend, get the GCF’s approach to adaptation right.

However,...

Development banks committed record funds to climate finance in 2018, but key vulnerabilities in adaptation finance, cofinancing and portfolio alignment persist, and some institutions even backslid. To meet 2020 goals, MDBs need to kick it into overdrive.

When the Green Climate Fund received its first round of funding, contributions were more or less arbitrary. This time around, countries have an opportunity to root their contributions in objective measures of capacity, responsibility and ambition.

The World Bank plays a pivotal role in enabling sustainable, low-carbon development and climate action. Its next president should be a leader on the issue.

World's largest climate fund is nearing the end of its first round of funding. As examples from Mongolia, India and Morocco show, the Green Climate Fund can be a game-changer for getting low-carbon projects off the ground in developing nations.