Bridging funding gaps for climate and sustainable development:Pitfalls, progress and potential of private finance

By R. Clark, J. Reed, T. Sunderland. 2018

279 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a world where natural capital is often unpriced or undervalued, thus making resource exploitation very lucrative, environmentally degrading activities will continue to dominate the economy. The past decade has seen a bourgeoning interest in scaling up private investment to address persistent socioeconomic and environmental challenges globally. The recently formulated sustainable development goals and global climate agenda have further heightened the urgency for a more holistic and integrated conceptualization of transitioning towards a sustainable low-carbon economy. Despite the increasing appeal of green finance as a concept, the delivery of an empirical evidence base that illustrates the effectiveness of projects aligned with climate action and sustainable development—both in terms of measurable performance and value for money—has been less forthcoming. Concurrently, there have been numerous claims of the potential of ‘unlocking’ the trillions of dollars of private finance that is available for investment. We perform a critical analysis of literature from across a spectrum of research topics to explore the inhibiting barriers and apparent disconnect between the purported available—or required—finance and the actual finance invested in sustainable development. Furthermore, we consider actions that government agencies and the research community might consider in order to better incentivize private investment in developing and low-income countries that will facilitate low-carbon sustainable development. We provide suggestions for fiscal and policy reform in addition to identifying the need for a centralized reporting and convening body. We conclude that far more coordinated efforts are required to encourage investments in long-term and sustainable landscape-scale initiatives. Current efforts at securing finance, implementing initiatives and building the knowledge base are accelerating but remain fragmented and often sectorial in their nature; we thus offer some key recommendations for areas of future progress.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db2671ac6a21aed16a9340d62f238867079fbc6d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Green bonds for the Paris agreement and sustainable development goals (2019, background): “International finance institutions (IFIs) Due to their regular advisory roles and expert knowledge of market policies and regulations, many of the development finance institutions among the IFIs of this study have led sustainable development investing in low-income countries (Clark et al 2018).”
Climate risk and financial stability in the network of banks and investment funds (2020, unknown): “…7(Barucca et al., 2016; Allen and Gale, 2001; Gai and Kapadia, 2010; Roukny et al., 2013; Di Iasio et al., 2013; Tabak et al., 2013; Thurner and Poledna, 2013; Poledna and Thurner, 2016; Fink et al., 2016; Puliga et al., 2014; Bardoscia et…”
Assessing the Opportunities and Challenges of Green Finance in Italy: An Analysis of the Biomass Production Sector (2019, background): “[53] on the progress and potential of private finance for climate and Figure 2.”
Past, present, and future of sustainable finance: insights from big data analytics through machine learning of scholarly research (2022, unknown): “Some researchers have reasoned that funding for sustainable ﬁnance and sustainable development continues to be developing, and thus, more empirical evidence in both established and emerging markets is needed (Clark et al., 2018).”
Towards the achievement of SDG 7 in sub-Saharan Africa: Creating synergies between Power Africa, Sustainable Energy for All and climate finance in-order to achieve universal energy access before 2030 (2018, background): “[22] who concluded that Africa requires”