Climate Finance Knowledge Brokering: Game Changer In The Making?

By Agathe Cavicchioli, Climate and Society ’13

“For me finance is no longer associated with wearing suits and reading the Wall Street Journal.” I am glad my classmate Ricarda Dahlheimer cleared that up for all of us in her post earlier this summer and made the task of describing my summer internship a great deal easier. Since I started my internship at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in early June, I have enjoyed the comfort of light summer dresses and not once read the Wall Street Journal. And yet, I work on climate finance.

“Show me the money” -Rod Tidwell

Among other tasks, my greatest responsibility at the UNDP Energy and Environment Group (UNDP EEG) has been to keep the online Climate Finance Options (CFO) Platform up-to-date with the latest developments in climate finance. The CFO is a joint UNDP and World Bank initiative that provides comprehensive climate finance and investment finance information for stakeholders worldwide. The CFO consists of a database of funding sources searchable through various criteria (scope, scale, mechanisms, etc.), which gives practitioners understandable and easily accessible information for locating certain types of funding for climate projects. Currently, the CFO has the largest database of available funding sources worldwide, covering funding for mitigation/low-carbon development, adaptation and capacity-building projects from institutions at different levels and from both private and public sector.

Additionally, the CFO offers an extensive knowledge center comprising a library of climate finance publications, a news section for climate finance information watch, which includes developments as part of the global negotiations on climate change or various calls for proposals and interest. The Platform also compiles On The Ground stories from projects implemented throughout the world using one or more funding sources listed on the CFO Platform.

My role as intern has been to contribute to all the components of the CFO Platform: finding and uploading new funding source profiles, adding publications to the knowledge centers, and writing news items. A significant portion of my time, however, was undoubtedly devoted to finding new funding sources and adding them to the CFO database, which sometimes required liaising with the financial institutions and ensuring that all information that may be needed by the CFO Platform Users Community was addressed in the funding profile. I have also kept a climate finance news watch over the summer and had the chance to blog about recent developments notably since the first experts meeting on long-term finance in Manila and in the run-up to the COP19 in Warsaw, Poland.

“The most valuable commodity I know of is information” -Gordon Gekko

Although distant at first from my very academic background in adaptation research, this internship at the UNDP EEG, and especially my responsibilities towards the CFO Platform embody everything that I have always believed to be crucial for successful climate policy and the very reason why I joined the C+S program. The CFO Platform contributes to bridging the ever persistent gap between climate change information production, decision-making and on the ground action. Thankfully, this niche is growing, as a recent International Institute for Sustainable Development report indicates. Climate brokering, which can be defined as “a set of intermediary activities that link knowledge production and use,” is addressing the demand for information and knowledge and therefore providing decision-makers with the expertise they require to inform their decisions – investment decisions in climate-friendly projects in the context of the CFO. By providing easily useable information on where to find funds, climate finance knowledge brokering might just make climate finance the game changer that we need it to be.

“No sector will thrive unless there is a financial vehicle that allows channeling money towards a certain cause” -Ricarda Dahlheimer (really making it easier for me)