Estimating mobilised private climate finance : methodological approaches, options and trade-offs

Quantifying the effect of public interventions aimed at mobilising private finance for climate activities is technically complex and challenging. As a step towards addressing this complexity, the report presents a framework of key decision points for estimating publicly mobilised private finance. This framework outlines different methodological options and choices needed to make these estimates. It assesses trade-offs and implications of these choices in terms of their accuracy, the incentives they provide, their potential to be standardised across entities, and their practicality (data availability, expertise and resource demands). The report further identifies and suggests practical options available in the short-term for estimating mobilised private finance, while underlining the need to provide transparency about underlying definitions, assumptions and limitations. It also recommends longer-term actions to improve these methods, including the need to converge on definitions, to build data systems and to improve and standardise estimation methods. The primary objective of this report is to inform the development of methods to measure in a transparent manner progress towards the fulfilment of the financial commitments made by developed countries in the context of international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It also aims to encourage careful examination of the links between public interventions and private climate finance. This is to ensure that methods to estimate mobilisation help encourage the efficiency and effectiveness of public interventions aimed at mobilising such finance.