FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — Bonn, 13 November 2017, 16:30
Today, the COP22 Presidency, Citizens’ Climate Education, and the Geoversiv Foundation introduced Resilience Intel: a first-of-its-kind Climate-Smart Finance Aggregator.
The Aggregator will use a light-touch analysis to parse any investment or spending into good / bad / neutral and then add up all of the good, to identify hidden climate-action money across the whole economy. This is critical to making NDCs into Economy-wide National Climate Action Plans.
Siham Ayad, chief climate finance advisor to the COP22 Presidency, explains that the 2nd high-level ministerial Dialogue on climate finance identified four priorities for meeting the Paris Agreement aims:
- finance strategies for achieving the NDCs,
- scaling up adaptation finance,
- effective technology transfer,
- and capacity building.
To meet these challenges, the COP22 sought to identify “transformative actions that we can put in place for countries to achieve their NDCs and to finance the climate transition.” That work developed into the a detailed pathway for scaling up deployed climate-related finance from billions of dollars to trillions.
The COP22 Climate Finance Pathway is a strategic collaborative planning process. Its three core areas of action–country-driven process, increasing adaptation finance, and enhancing the leverage of public resources to catalyze private finance–all require the redirection of already existing funds to climate-smart practices.
Renat Heuberger, CEO of the South Pole Group, one of the early leaders in the field of climate finance, gave a practitioner’s view of the importance of this Resilience Intel effort. Not only will redirected climate-capable money help to address climate change; it will help to build resilience and insure against risks tied to fast-moving market trends.
$16.5 trillion will be directed to innovate at the pace required to limit global average temperature rise to 2ºC or below. Heuberger noted: “This is not just cash spent… this is about leveraged capital that is invested… some people say it’s probably the biggest business opportunity of this century–to solve climate change.” He added that: “The dollar value attached to low-carbon pathways is becoming increasingly important.”
Christiana Figueres–former Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC and Convenor of Mission 2020–today repeated the call to financial-sector transformation she issued prior to the Paris Agreement. She said that by next September we should have a “clear line of sight” to a near future world in which “no finance can go into any activity that is actually damaging the planet and putting the welfare of citizens at risk.”
Joe Robertson–Global Strategy Director for Citizens’ Climate Education–was asked how the Aggregator will provide targeted resilience intelligence for climate-smart investments. He said:
The solvency of nations depends on their ability to protect and grow intangible systemic value–human capital, natural capital, the must-have underpinnings of thriving sustainable societies. This effort looks at any kind of spending, investment or finance, and grades it as negative, neutral or positive, in terms of climate resilience.
The resulting resilience intel is locally rooted, can be compared against peers and against other levels of operational decision-making, to make it easier to see the value of redirecting funds to climate-smart priorities.
Resilience intelligence will be central to all nations’ efforts to plan toward and meet the ambitions of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. In Paris, this December, partners and advisors in the Resilience Intel effort will gather to outline the methodology for connecting across platforms, alongside a strategic timeline for rapidly ramping up the amount of climate-smart finance aggregated, and set for upgrading.
Resilience Intel will mobilize a coalition of actors to achieve the aims of the COP22 Climate Finance Pathway and achieve that clear line of sight Ms. Figueres called for, to a climate-resilient future.
- Follow progress at ResilienceIntel.org
- View the briefing at ctzn.earth/csfa-cop23
- For more information, contact Joe Robertson at jr(at)citizensclimate.org
