Trinomics has been commissioned a support contract by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) to track private sector climate finance that has been mobilised by the Netherlands through the use of public interventions and public finance instruments.

In November 2010, the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing (AGF) published its assessment of the potential for climate finance by 2020. The overall conclusion of the AGF’s report is that the goal of mobilizing USD 100 billion per year for climate finance to developing countries by 2020 would be feasible, but challenging. The underlying assumption of AGF’s conclusion is that the EU’s share in the mobilized capital could be about one third of the overall amount. In order to achieve these (challenging) goals, a mix of public finance, private finance and alternative sources of finance (e.g. carbon market finance) is needed. Knowing that the (international, European and national) government budgets – public finance – are under pressure, the potential of the carbon market and private sector will have to play an important role in this.

Our team will provide the Dutch Government support in further developing the methodology to track, and the tools to measure, their mobilised international private climate finance (in cooperation with the Research Collaborative of the OECD). As such, a work group has been established, consisting of Triple E Consulting staff members and senior policymakers from the Dutch Government, to provide input and discuss methodological and political issues to refine the existing tracking methodology. Questions that need to be answered do not only consider definitions and calculation methods, but also include issues such as how to avoid double counting when multiple actors are involved, and how to report in a coherent and transparent way when dealing with various instruments and limited information on the private sector.

Furthermore, an assessment will be made of their past mobilised private climate finance (with stocktaking in 2012) as well as a solid forecast of the mobilised private climate finance flows for 2015.

This assessment also aims to identify (reporting) barriers and best practices, and will provide policy recommendations for further improvements.

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact Jeroen van der Laan.