Category: Investment Funds

Climate finance is hot, and right­fully so. The threat is real, and the needs are towering. The good news is that there are investible solutions out there. As with any new field, the development of climate finance has been accompanied by a range of standards, taxon­omies and met­rics. For climate mitigation, a clear consensus seems to be emerging on emissions reductions as the preferred metric to be tracked by investors, however the jury is still out on the ideal standards for tracking the impact of climate adaptation, and it is only starting to deliberate on resilience projects.

This difference in the pace of development of climate mitigation and adaptation standards has led to an unintended consequence: that the story of climate finance today is the story of climate mitigation. Less than 10 percent of all climate finance today goes to adaptation and resilience. This happens not because mitigation is more important than adaptation, but because the impact of mitigation projects is easier to track than that of adaptation projects. Simply put: what gets measured, gets managed.

The problem with too narrow of a focus on climate mitigation is that it does not take into account the fact that climate change is a challenge of livelihoods and social justice as much as it is an environmental chal­lenge, especially for low-income populations and other vulnerable com­muni­ties in the global South. Because climate change is not gender neu­tral, applying a gender (or JEDI for Justice, Equity, Diversity) approach to investments can