Topic: investment

WRI’s “Climate Finance” series tackles a broad range of issues relevant to public contributors, intermediaries, and recipients of climate finance—that is, financial flows to developing countries to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change impacts. A subset of this series, including this paper on OPIC and Ex-Im Bank, examines how different types of public climate finance providers and intermediaries–or international finance entities like the proposed Green Climate Fund–can help meet the significant investment needs of developing countries by mobilizing private sector investment. These publications acknowledge the importance of over-arching support for complementary climate change policies that create attractive market conditions domestically but focus on the use of financial instruments.

The face of development finance is changing. China is quickly becoming one of the world’s largest overseas investors, measured by the amount of money it directs overseas. Many of these projects are large-scale, high impact projects involving natural resources. They’re reshaping the relationship between investor and recipient countries, as well as posing opportunities for environmental and social initiatives.

This issue brief analyzes the opportunities and challenges faced by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and policy banks as they invest overseas. It provides insights about how to move forward in the development of environmental and social policies as they relate to risk management.

This fact sheet updates a May 2012 working paper on the U.S. fast-start finance (FSF) contribution over the 2010-2012 period. It analyzes the financial instruments involved in the U.S. self-reported portfolio—about $7.5 billion, or 20 percent of the total FSF commitment globally. It also identifies the extent to which climate change objectives target adaptation and mitigation through recipient institutions in developing countries. It is intended to provide a range of key players in climate finance—including policymakers, development finance institutions, companies, and non-governmental organizations—with an assessment of past efforts to define, deliver, and report U.S. FSF in order to inform delivery of future climate finance.

Shifting to a low-carbon economy will require current emitting countries and projected future emitters to rapidly scale up their investments in renewable energy. By some estimates, China is already the leading global investor in renewable energy infrastructure, and is increasing its overseas investments in renewable energy, particularly solar and wind. This working paper aims to help policymakers, investors, and researchers better understand the trends in China’s overseas investments in the wind and solar industries, as well as the factors behind those trends.

These documents explain the methodology WRI employed for its research and provide a listing of the projects considered in its working paper, Public Financing Instruments to Leverage Private Capital for Climate-Relevant Investment: Focus on Multilateral Agencies. The methodology may serve as a useful baseline reference for similar undertakings across entities. The project database further indicates the depth and breadth of climate-relevant investment data that is publicly available.

This document maps the types of financial instruments used by various development financial institutions, export credit agencies, and climate funds to support their operations. It can serve as a useful reference for public sector decision-makers evaluating the broad toolkit of options available to support private sector climate change mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries.

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.

This document provides a glossary of financing instruments and the mechanism of these instruments. These definitions may serve as a useful reference for public sector decision-makers evaluating the broad toolkit of options available to support private sector climate change mitigation projects in developing countries.

These tables provide examples of donor government, development bank, research organization, and private sector efforts that examine how to use public climate finance to leverage private capital for climate change mitigation projects in developing countries. These tables are intended to illustrate, rather than exhaustively list, the range of research and convening initiatives focused on this topic. This document will periodically be updated as the landscape of such initiatives is dynamic and shifts periodically.

This document provides an array of relevant papers, publications, and resources that address: 1) Using Public Resources to Leverage Private Sector Participation; 2) Types of Public Financing Instruments and Mechanisms; and 3) Other Contextual Publications. These reading resources represent the current span of literature in climate finance as it relates to the private sector and can be reviewed to enhance one’s understanding of the nuanced opportunities and challenges presented by climate finance. This document will periodically be updated as organizations continue to publish in this space.

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.