Water

The Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2012 identifies global climate finance flows of USD 364 billion in 2011. The private sector provided the majority of finance, mostly from developed countries. The public sector acted as a catalyst for private investment by providing incentives and concessional loans, as well as bilateral aid to developing countries. Public and private intermediaries, especially national development banks and commercial banks, played an important role in channeling as well as raising climate finance.

This guidebook is intended to address challenges in accessing climate finance and assist developing countries in speeding up the transfer, deployment, and diffusion of mitigation technologies, enabling to contribute to climate change mitigation and reduce climate change impacts while pursuing national development goals. Over 100 public and private funding sources are analyzed and their main features and application requirements and procedures presented. A general section provides guidance on how to prepare high quality project and programme proposals.  

This publication surveys the green growth landscape and makes the argument that greening growth is necessary, efficient, and affordable. It is critical to achieving sustainable development and mostly amounts to good growth policies. Obstacles to greening growth are political and behavioral inertia and a lack of financing instruments—not the cost of green policies as commonly thought. Green growth should focus on what needs to be done in the next five to 10 years to avoid getting locked into unsustainable paths and to generate immediate, local benefits.  

The total value of the carbon market grew by 11 percent in 2011, to $176 billion, and transaction volumes reached a new high of 10.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) according to a new report from the World Bank. The report, State and Trends of the Carbon Market 2012, shows that this growth took place in the face of economic turbulence, growing long-term oversupply in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) and plummeting carbon prices.

The paper presents a framework for understanding what it means to be “ready” to plan for, access, deliver, and monitor climate finance in a transformative way at the national level. The aim is provide policy-makers with an overall lens through which readiness and preparatory activities offered by a range of international, regional, and national partners can be organised.

The Report showcases the UNDP-GEF adaptation portfolio, focusing on both the principles underlying the UNDP-GEF approach to adaptation programming and the key processes involved in removing barriers to successful adaptation measures. The report highlights emerging achievements of UNDP-GEF initiatives around the world and explores the future of low-emission climate-resilient development.

This series of short, introductory briefing on various aspects of climate finance are designed for readers new to the debate on global climate change financing. In light of the fast pace of developments in climate finance, the briefs allow the reader to gain a better understanding of the quantity and quality of financial flows going to developing countries.