Climate Finance and Markets

Understanding Private Climate Finance: A Critical Reader

What does climate change means for the financial sector? And what does financial sector involvement mean for climate change projects? "Understanding Private Climate Finance: A Critical Reader" examines the private sector turn in climate finance through the role of financial liberalization, private sector actors (from banks to private equity funds), public institutions' attempts to “leverage” private investment, carbon markets and public-private partnerships.

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A Glossary of Climate Finance Terms

Do you speak ‘climate finance’? We've created a glossary for anyone who wants to know their way around the complex language of finance products and institutions related to climate change. The main focus is on terminology relating to private sector climate finance. That's a deliberate choice. With ever more emphasis being placed on ‘leveraging’ private finance - one of the terms we define - we hope to make clear what was at stake in placing ever more reliance on banks, private equity funds and other financial services providers.

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Wall Street's Climate Finance Bonanza

Government officials from an elite group of developed countries meeting in Washington DC appear to be on the brink of instigating yet another big bank giveaway, this time in the name of fighting climate change.

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Private Climate Finance: A Crash Course

Climate finance is rapidly evolving, with the private sector now being looked at as the source for a majority of funding for climate-related programmes and activities.

This online course is designed to help civil society groups and campaigners to understand more about the emerging private sector climate finance architecture, examine who has the money to invest and what they are spending it on; and explain key proposals in non-technical language.

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The Financial Enclosure of the Commons

We live in an age of finance capitalism, when trading money, risk and associated products is more profitable than trading goods and services. That, in short, is what people often refer to as the ‘financialisation’ of the economy. New financial assets are today being created from existing commodities, and where markets do not yet exist natural resources will have to be traded so that new commodities and markets can emerge.

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Climate Bonds

There are various definitions of climate bonds, ranging from those covering any ‘climate themed’ activity (e.g. funding renewable energy infrastructure or public mass transit systems) through to the creation of specific financial instruments called ‘climate bonds’.

Derivatives

Financial instruments whose value depends on something else – a foreign currency, an interest rate, or the anticipated price of an asset at a future date. For example, a company developing a CDM project may agree to sell 10,000 carbon credits at a price of US$100,000 in five years time.

Leverage

‘Leveraging’ is used loosely in the context of climate finance, where it refers to public finance (e.g. from international finance institutions) that is used to encourage private investors to back the same project.

REDD +

REDD+ is a scheme that puts a cash value on forests on the assumption that this will result in their preservation and, in turn, a carbon saving. The acronym stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation.