Ministers and senior officials from more than a dozen countries met in New York, NY on September 21 for the third meeting of the Climate Finance Mobilization process. The process is an ongoing dialogue on how to enhance and accelerate the scale up and mobilization of climate finance for low-emission and climate-resilient activities in developing countries.  Norway and the United States co-chaired the meeting. Attendees included ministers and senior officials from a broad range of government entities, including ministries of foreign affairs, environment, finance, and development, as well as representatives from development finance institutions, export credit agencies, and intergovernmental organizations.

Participants reaffirmed their commitment to the goal of mobilizing US$100 billion per year by 2020 from both public and private sources to support mitigation and adaptation in the context of meaningful mitigation action and transparent implementation. The co-chairs emphasized that mobilizing climate finance is an inherently complex task requiring a range of delivery channels, instruments and tools, and implementation strategies. In order to take stock of progress in meeting this goal and identify new opportunities to do so, representatives from public financial institutions, including multilateral development banks (MDBs), development finance institutions (DFIs), and export credit agencies (ECAs) presented on their climate finance efforts.

The co-chairs noted the significant progress that public finance institutions have made to date in providing a strong core of public finance to support climate change action in developing countries, with MDBs and DFIs committing approximately US$40 billion in 2013 alone. ECAs discussed their on-going effort to track climate finance and report in the near future. All participants encouraged public finance institutions to continue to use public funds in a manner that supported clean energy and greater resiliency in the developing world. Participants underscored the importance of a successful initial capitalization of the Green Climate Fund.

Participants noted the importance of mobilizing the private sector to finance a world-wide transition to a low-carbon economy and examined the role of the public sector in catalyzing and redirecting private capital flows. Consistent with the focus on leveraging private investment, participants welcomed the successful launch of the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance (www.climatefinancelab.org) a new global public-private initiative to identify and pilot cutting edge climate finance instruments in order to unlock billions of dollars in new private investment for climate change mitigation and adaption in developing countries.

Participants recognized the critical role that domestic policy frameworks play in attracting private capital and shifting investment from high-carbon to low-carbon, climate-resilient activities. Participants agreed on the importance of engaging with developing countries to identify, design, and implement appropriate regulatory and policy tools available at a domestic level to address both climate-specific factors such as technology and policy risks, as well as non-climate related factors, such as legal and political risk. 

Participants also discussed the importance of obtaining a more comprehensive picture of countries’ efforts to mobilize both public and private finance. To this end, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shared an update on the technical work of the Research Collaborative on Tracking Private Climate Finance, which is working to develop tools for countries to track mobilized private climate finance.

The co-chairs commended the substantial progress of the climate finance mobilization process. The co-chairs also called for continuing efforts to improve climate finance tracking, enhanced coordination with finance ministries and improved communications of the on-going collective mobilization efforts and results.