Advances in Climate Change Research (Mar 2020)
Blind spots in climate finance for innovation
Abstract
International climate finance is a sub-set of green finance and refers to investments specifically in climate change mitigation and adaptation activities, which primarily involve public finance and the leveraging of private finance in developing countries. In addition to continued international support for scaling low carbon solutions and facilitating replicability in developing countries, there remains an important need to increase the amount of climate finance provided to innovation, particularly demonstration (for technology innovation) and pilot implementation (for policy innovation), and to channel a greater proportion of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to ‘hard-to-abate’ areas, such as industrial decarbonisation, international transport and cross-sectoral issues like cooling and behavioural insights, to accelerate the commercialisation and implementation of technological, financial and policy solutions to contribute to meeting the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting global warming to ‘well-below’ 2 °C in these countries. Linking research, development and demonstration (RD&D) support with technical assistance is important in providing the route to obtain wider donor finance (concessional finance) and private finance to enable deployment through scalability and replicability.
