- Client: French Ministry of Economy and Finance
- Implementation period: January, 2015 - December, 2015 (Completed)
- Geographic coverage: France, Global
- Theme: Climate Change
- Topic: Adaptation and Resilience
- Experts: Hans Bolscher, Elske Veenstra
How did France perform in leveraging private climate finance as a result of French public sector interventions?
In addressing the challenges of ‘climate change’, substantial investments in climate mitigation and climate adaptation are required in the decades to come. During the Conference of Parties (COP) under the UNFCCC in Copenhagen (2009) it was decided that the rich developed countries will support the developing countries with USD 100 billion per year to spend on climate related projects. The EU and other developed countries understand the USD 100 billion as mentioned in the Copenhagen commitment as originating from both public (national or multilateral) or private sources, when the latter is mobilised by public intervention. This report tries to estimate and analyse the mobilisation of private climate finance as a result of bilateral French public interventions over the period 2013-2014. This study was commissioned not only to get better insight into the figures but also to better understand the (rather complex) methodological issues that are involved in these calculations. As such, the study has contributed to the work of the OECD-hosted Research Collaborative on Tracking Private Climate Finance.
The main conclusions and key findings of the project can be summarised as follows:
- After applying the methodology for tracking private climate finance on the available data, the project concludes that French public climate finance instruments from the French institutions: AFD, Proparco, FFEM and FASEP-RPE have mobilised a total of EUR 1.28 billion of private climate finance over the years 2013 and 2014. Due to the limited scope (with exclusion in particular of French contributions to multilateral development banks and funds) the actual total contribution is substantially higher. Therefore, the results do not represent the full contribution of the French government and institutions.
- The methodology to calculate the mobilisation of private climate finance is not set in stone. The different choices have a major impact on the outcome. Also within the different institutions different systems are used today. Especially the impact of the definition of climate finance and the valuation of the different instruments require further research and harmonisation. Also how to value and include the role of policy support and project preparation support needs further thinking.
- Climate finance is getting more and more intertwined with development finance and we think it would be logical and practical to see if we can find synergies by streamlining data collection and reporting on both streams of finance.
- Credit lines are a successful instrument for mobilising private capital. Being so relevant for the total outcome we advised to better underpin the estimated ratios or to go from ratios to real project data to make the outcomes more robust.