Resilience Intel — coalition effort building a system to identify climate action money across the whole economy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
14 December 2017, 16:30 GMT+1 (Paris time)

Yesterday, in follow-up to the One Planet Summit, the Kingdom of Morocco, Citizens’ Climate Education, the International Centre for Dialogue and Peacebuilding, and the Geoversiv Foundation co-convened a Working Dialogue on Resilience Intel, at the Embassy of Morocco in Paris. The focus was a coalition effort to co-create the Climate-Smart Finance Aggregator, to uncover and expand climate-focused spending across the whole economy.

The dialogue was opened by Morocco’s Ambassador to France Chakib Benmoussa, who re-emphasized Morocco’s firm commitment to long-term engagement to build on the COP22 Presidency’s efforts to lead the much-needed work of scaling-up climate finance. This includes ongoing work to enhance global action for more effective climate-related impact on the ground, in particular for adaptation projects and developing countries.

Ambassador Benmoussa highlighted the COP22 Presidency’s path-breaking work to ensure climate finance flows and adaptation spending align with global solidarity and responsibility.

There is no way to gain from avoiding that responsibility. The rapidly accelerating cost of climate impacts already shows that failing to move toward resilience priorities puts the stability of national finances at risk. Joseph Robertson, Global Strategy Director for Citizens’ Climate Education and Geoversiv founder, who chaired the dialogue, said:

Put simply: if we do not succeed in making all finance climate-smart, then we will not succeed in sustaining shared prosperity in any nation.

This is the motivation for building Resilience Intel — a major technical outcome of the Acceleration Dialogues, and the first comprehensive system for aggregating climate-smart finance in all sectors, qualified, dedicated, partial, or hidden. The aim is to accelerate global efforts to meet the long-term climate finance goal put forth by Christiana Figueres, who said during last month’s COP23:

no finance can go into any activity that is actually damaging the planet and putting the welfare of citizens at risk.

In her keynote address, Ms. Nezha Hayat, Chairperson and CEO of the Moroccan Capital Markets Authority (AMMC), and Vice-President of the IOSCO’s Africa / Middle East Regional Committee, recalled the urgency to act to enable a fully integrated climate-smart financial ecosystem across different countries and regions. She highlighted the Marrakech Pledge for Fostering Capital Markets in Africa, launched in Marrakech during COP22, now endorsed by 21 African capital markets regulators and exchanges, and emphasized Morocco’s strong commitment to

move rapidly in the implementation of its national roadmap to align financial systems to climate resilience and sustainable development requirements adopted in Marrakech during COP22, and the issue of adequate financial regulation and the promotion of new financial instruments such as green bonds.

Participants in the Working Dialogue, which was held under the Chatham House Rule, examined key questions relating to Adaptation Metrics, measuring the invisible value of successfully avoiding cost and risk, how getting down to local detail drives a more rapid scaling up of global pools for climate-smart finance, and critical technical challenges relating to provenance and accounting of all climate-smart funds in circulation.

In addressing these questions, the following were put forward for immediate follow-up:

In examining the tension between qualitative and quantitative information tracking, a potentially transformational new insight emerged. While experience shows that qualitative ratings that require subjective judgments of value are not easily aggregated, the right design for aligning qualitative judgments with hard numbers ($10… $10,000… $949,473) allows for aggregating quantities accurately, which also account for quality and context.

Resilience Intel will have to account not only for qualitative and quantitative inputs, but work across three levels:

  • qualitative analysis,
  • contextual integration, and
  • quantitative reporting.

The Working Dialogue also highlighted the need to go beyond what is commonly called “big data” to focus instead on leveraging smart interactions between big and small datasets, to ensure new additional insight is achieved in a reliable way.

Participants noted the need for a shared understanding of how carbon pricing policies create new efficiencies, measurable as everyday economic value and climate-action return on investment in local communities. Such contextual reference points allow for re-assessing climate-action opportunity in any area of spending or investment.

At the end of the One Planet Summit, French President Emmanuel Macron thanked the world leaders and major institutions in attendance for their transformational commitments to shift investment priorities, and announced the formation of a One Planet Coalition. Resilience Intel will begin to inform efforts at all levels, in 2018, to ensure the values and aims outlined above are consistently met by major efforts to accelerate climate action spending, in support of the One Planet Coalition and Paris Agreement.

The Resilience Intel system is now in development.

Throughout 2018, leaders of the coalition effort will convene more working dialogues with political and practitioner partners, to link the core Resilience Intel effort to priorities such as:

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For further information relating to this effort, please contact Citizens’ Climate Education Global Strategy Director, Joseph Robertson, at jr@citizensclimate.org

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