Blog Posts: climate finance

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.

The United States still doesn't give any money to the world's largest climate fund. But things are looking up, with big contributions to the Global Environment Facility, the Montreal Protocol Multilateral Fund and the multilateral development banks.

The COP 24 climate negotiations in Katowice, Poland delivered mixed results. Finance was an important part of the package agreed upon. Some countries made new financial commitments, but overall pledges fell short of the scale needed to enable truly ambitious action in line with what the latest science is calling for. On a more positive note, negotiators agreed on post-2020 financing rules that improve transparency on both past and future funding, and establish important processes to deliver on the...

Development banks can align their investments in electricity grids with the Paris Agreement by incorporating a shadow carbon price and making sure their investments support long-term plans for decarbonizing the electricity sector.