Category: <span>Blogs</span>

Rising public climate finance flows only tell part of the story

By Liane Schalatek Just in time for the international climate community coming together from December 3-14 for this year’s international climate summit, the COP24 in Katowice, Poland, two complementary sets of climate finance data and reports, one by the UNFCCC’s Standing Committee on Finance (SCF), the other by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development…

Climate Funds Update highlights: May 2016

The Paris Agreement necessitates a gear change in progress on the ground In December 195 nations came together in Paris to secure an historic global climate agreement. The question of who should foot the bill for implementing the agreement was always at the core of the negotiations, and especially so for poorer countries with little historical…

Better data can help international forest finance flow

In this blog Marigold Norman of the Overseas Development Institute discusses what improved capacities for producing reliable data on forest cover mean for access to international REDD+ finance. http://www.odi.org/comment/9879-better-data-can-help-international-forest-finance-flow

Getting it together: institutional arrangements for coordination and stakeholder engagement in climate finance

Vyoma Jha, Centre for Policy Research (CPR) Countries around the world are establishing arrangements to direct public finance and international investment towards climate change mitigation or adaptation. CPR and ODI have been working with researchers in Colombia, India, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and Zambia to understand how these work. While the economic circumstances, and the policy framework for action on climate change…

Increasing the transparency of climate-related development finance flows: publishing detail on over 7,000 projects in 2013

Stephanie Ockenden, OECD Development Cooperation Directorate Climate change and development are intrinsically linked, and external development finance flows have a critical role to play in supporting this transition.  Achieving an efficient and effective allocation of this finance will be critical to support our climate change goals and to ensure the most vulnerable are reached. Improved…

The coordination of climate finance in India

Vyoma Jha, Centre for Policy Research The Indian government recently announced the enhancement of solar energy targets under the National Solar Mission to 100 GW by 2019 as compared to the initial aim of 22 GW by 2022, targeting nearly US$100 billion in renewable energy investments over the next five years. It also established a…

Climate Finance Fundamentals 2014

Sam Barnard, ODI The UNFCCC COP20 kicked off this week in Peru. Day by day more negotiators and observers are arriving at ‘el Pentagonito’, the Peruvian army headquarters in Lima where this year’s conference is being held, in the hope of making progress towards the global climate agreement billed to be signed in Paris in November of…

The local-global link in adaptation financing

Alice Caravani attended the recent Community Based Adaptation Conference (CBA8) in Kathmandu, Nepal, organised by IIED. In this opinion piece for ODI she reflects on experiences with adaptation financing in Nepal, and steps that can be taken to better align the priorities and decisions of international donors with the needs of those on the ground. http://www.odi.org.uk/opinion/8375-local-global-link-adaptation-financing

More than meetings: the way forward on climate finance

Smita Nakhooda, ODI At the COP 19 in Warsaw, Christiana Figueres sent governments back home with a command: “Governments, and especially developed nations, must go back to do their homework so they can put their plans on the table ahead of the Paris conference”. What exactly does it mean? On finance, it means that developed…

Who’s ready for climate finance?

Richard Calland (Africa Climate Finance Hub) and Smita Nakhooda (ODI) Is it a bird or is it a plane? The question of what ‘readiness’ for climate finance involves has attracted a great deal of attention and debate, particularly since the Green Climate Fund is supposed to channel $100 billion a year by 2020 for climate action and…

REDD+ finance: where next?

Marigold Norman, Forest Trends and Charlene Watson, ODI In bringing together the views of a number of initiatives tracking REDD+ finance, this series has highlighted why there isn’t a single aggregate figure for global REDD+ finance flowing. Despite this, we are increasingly able to assess where finance is coming from, how it flows through different channels…

REDD+ Finance: Private Lessons For The Public Sphere

Molly Peters-Stanley, Ecosystem Marketplace Kenya’s Kasigau Corridor Project that Reduces Deforestation and forest Degradation (“REDD”) protects 200,000 hectares of endangered forest between the Tsavo East and Tsavo West National Parks. The Surui Forest Carbon Project protects 32,000 hectares of endangered forest in the Brazilian Amazon. Cambodia’s Oddar Meanchey REDD+ Project protects 64,000 hectares of endangered…

REDD+ Finance: What do we know about the private sector contribution?

Iain Henderson & Jacinto Coello, UNEP FI There is broad consensus that private finance and investment are needed for REDD+ to meet its climate change mitigation potential in the medium to long-term. Those who are familiar with REDD+ will have heard countless variations of an equation that currently does not balance.  Annual REDD+ additional investment…

REDD+ finance: Lessons from the US

Jeff Metcalfe, Tropical Forest Group The Tropical Forest Group has been tracking the REDD+ finance flowing from the U.S. in its U.S. REDD+ Finance Database (USRFD). This contains more than 800 data points for REDD or sustainable forestry reported by United States agencies with data transcribed from public documents. Although it is not linked to the US government, the…

REDD+ finance: What you see isn’t always what you get

Alice Harrison, Transparency International A colleague recently likened his experience tracking climate and REDD+ money in Mexico to an archaeological dig. Little by little, fragments of your object begin to reveal themselves, but not without a significant amount of time, resources and tenacity. At Transparency International (TI) we have been monitoring climate finance flows in…

REDD+ finance: who’s counting?

Charlene Watson, ODI and Marigold Norman, Forest Trends Finance for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation plus conservation (REDD+) activities has been flowing for at least five years now. But what can we really say about how much finance there has been, where it has come from, where it is going, and what it is being spent…

Increasing transparency in climate finance: what role for the UNFCCC NAMA Registry?

This piece was written by Charlene Watson of the Overseas Development Institute. Since 2007, parties to the UNFCCC have been discussing the design of a registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs). This Registry would match developing country actions with possible sources of international financial support. Such a matching function may be difficult to realise, as funders…

Fast-Start Finance: where do we stand at the end of 2012?

This piece was co-authored by Smita Nakhooda of the Overseas Development Institute and Taryn Fransen of the World Resources Institute, with inputs from Noriko Shimizu (International Group for Environmental Strategies) and Sven Harmeling (Germanwatch). Developed countries self-report that they have delivered more than $33 billion in fast-start climate finance between 2010 and 2012, exceeding the pledges they made at…

Climate finance tracking 2.0

CFU is glad to feature this guest commentary on climate finance transparency from our colleague Maya Forstater, Climate Finance Advisor to Publish What You Fund. They say if you like sausages you should never visit a sausage factory. But users of Climate Funds Update’s data tools may be interested to read about the process involved. The…

Climate Finance: A few more fundamentals

As Qatar prepares to host COP 18, decisions on how to deliver and channel finance to help developing countries respond to climate change will again be on the agenda. Climate finance is mobilized in the context of UNFCCC principles that recognize countries common but differentiated responsibilities to act to address climate change. Despite fiscal pressures,…

Long Term Climate Finance

Estimates of the costs of addressing climate change in developing countries vary substantially from $480 billion to $ 1.5 trillion per year. Understanding growing needs for finance to help developing countries address climate change was the first item on the agenda at the workshop on Long Term Finance  hosted by the UNFCCC secretariat this week. How much money do we need? There…

The Green Climate Fund: Ready, set, go?

Smita Nakhooda (ODI) and Liane Schalatek (HBF) Climate finance was a hot topic at the UNFCCC COP in Durban, South Africa last year, and the adoption of the governing instrument of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) was a key outcome of the negotiations. This was a great relief: failure to reach agreement would have been read as…