Has the $100 Billion Climate Goal Been Reached?

In this note, we use newly available bilateral and multilateral finance data to provide an estimate of climate finance in 2022 based on the OECD’s approach and interpretation of the target. [...] Although many were under the impression this finance would be “new and additional” to existing development finance flows, as stipulated in the 2009 Copenhagen Agreement, the OECD and UN have only measured the total amounts of climate finance provided, without considering existing levels of climate or development finance. [...] We exclude this finance and add finance from the eight multilateral climate funds included by the OECD to avoid double-counting.3 Our estimate of multilateral climate finance using data from the MDB joint reports and the multilateral climate funds produces a close match with the OECD’s assessment (averaging within 5 percent); our estimate for 2021 is within $300m (or 0.7 percent) of the OECD asses. [...] The significant—almost threefold—increase in the volume of climate finance provided by MDBs since 2015 is a result of both a higher volume of finance overall and an increase in the share of finance with climate objectives. [...] In 2015, about 15 percent of the MDBs’ total operations of $130bn was climate finance for developing countries.4 That proportion has increased (with a drop in 2020, probably due to covid), and of the total $250bn of finance provided in 2022, 24 percent was climate finance.5 3 As per the OECD’s provided coefficients, these are the: Adaptation Fund; Climate Investment Funds; Global Environment Facil.