Multilateral development banks (MDBs) have announced that their global climate finance reached a record high of US$125 billion in 2023. The combined total last year from institutions including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is more than double the amount provided in 2019 when MDBs announced their ambition to increase volumes over time at the United Nations Secretary General’s Climate Action Summit.
Last year, US$74.7 billion of MDB climate finance was for low- and middle-income economies. Of this sum, 67 percent – or US$50 billion – went to climate change mitigation and US$24.7 billion, or 33 percent, to climate change adaptation.
The amount of mobilized private finance for this group of countries stood at US$28.5 billion.
In 2023, US$ 50.3 billion was allocated to high-income economies. Of this amount, US$47.3 billion, or 94 percent, was for climate change mitigation, and the remaining US$3 billion, or 6 percent was for climate change adaptation.
The amount of mobilized private finance for high-income countries stood at US$72.7 billion.
Climate finance in focus at COP29
The announcement on September 20, 2024, comes in the run-up to the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 29) to the United Nations Climate Change Conference that will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2024.
One of the key deliverables of COP29 is to increase global climate finance and reach an agreement on the new collective quantified goal for climate finance.
We are very pleased to be able again to announce record climate finance levels for the MDBs as a group, and also for the EBRD. We are acutely conscious that 2023 was an unprecedented year for both high temperatures and renewable-energy installations, emphasizing both the urgency of addressing the climate emergency and the scale of the economic opportunity. Given the focus in 2024 on really scaling climate finance, we note in particular the high levels of private-sector climate finance mobilization, reaching US$26.7 billion for the EBRD, said Harry Boyd-Carpenter, Managing Director for Climate Strategy and Delivery, EBRD.
Transparent joint reporting on climate finance
The Joint Report on Multilateral Development Banks’ Climate Finance is an annual collaboration to publish MDBs’ climate finance figures, together with a clear explanation of the methodologies for tracking this finance.
The joint report, along with the banks’ independent publication of their individual climate finance statistics, is intended to track progress in relation to their joint climate finance objectives such as those announced at COP21 and the greater ambition pledged for the post-2020 period.
The 2023 multilateral development bank report, coordinated and prepared for publication by the European Investment Bank (EIB), combines data from the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the EIB, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), the New Development Bank (NDB) and the World Bank Group (WBG).
