OUR TAKE – White Papers

Last week, while on a train from Madrid to Guadalajara for a quick day trip, I tuned into one of my favorite climate podcasts – Zero: The Climate Race, produced by Bloomberg. The episode, titled These ‘Beautiful’ Banks are Expected to Save Climate Finance, featured a compelling conversation between host Akshat Rathi and Avinash Persaud, the special advisor on climate risks to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank.

I recently had a friend who owns a small business ask how his company could become “net zero.” This term was completely new to him – he had heard it before but didn’t fully grasp what it meant. He understood it was about sustainability, but beyond that, he wasn’t sure where to start. I explained the basics and gave him a few pointers. But it dawned on me that I am so deep in the climate finance space, constantly surrounded by experts who understand climate change, sustainability, and corporate action in detail, that I sometimes forget people outside of our space are still learning.

For markets to scale effectively, essential building blocks must be in place. Climate finance, in particular, must expand at an unprecedented rate to meet the urgent demands of mitigating and adapting to climate change.

According to the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), annual climate finance flows reached nearly $1.3 trillion in 2021/2022, almost doubling compared to 2019/2020 levels.

IMPACT is back! As we kick off 2025, we are leaning on our IMPACT framework to share our predictions for the coming year.

The IMPACT acronym highlights key factors shaping the growth and momentum of climate finance, carbon markets, and impact investing and has proven to be a helpful tool in guiding our evaluations and forecasts.

IMPACT stands for:

Integrity, Momentum, Prices, Achievement, Collaboration, and Targets.

Written by Sean Penrith and Nathan Truitt Without credit guarantees, countless potential ventures simply remain dreams on paper Background In late March 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) released the final installment of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), an eight-year long undertaking from the world’s most authoritative scientific body on climate change. Among…