International Climate Finance & Policy

2025 is the year of the “implementation COP”. Can countries deliver the ambition needed in the new round of NDCs? Can they mobilize the necessary finance? We provide an overview and analysis of the core issues facing COP30 and the future of the UNFCCC climate regime. 

2024 is set to be the hottest year on record, with extreme weather globally. At COP29, nations will debate securing trillions for climate action, ensuring a fair transition, and operationalizing the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. Will justice and equity prevail?

COP28 takes place in Dubai from November 30 until December 12. We have collected our studies, analyses, and commentary on the important points up for debate here.

Data and digital technologies can support the transition to greener and more equitable urban transportation systems. This transatlantic project looks at how public-private data-sharing and seamless mobility across transportation modes can support cities in reaching their climate and inclusion goals – across very different regulatory systems.

This dossier explores what needs to improve in order for green equity to become a powerful instrument to support a green and socially inclusive transformation.

Environmental and climate crises are not gender neutral. They disproportionately affect people already facing multiple forms of discrimination. If feminist environmental policy is to extend beyond the effects on women, it needs to combine gender and ecological expertise. This dossier features a selection of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung's contributions over recent decades to international debates on environmental and gender justice. 

On paper, the GCF can accept considerable investment risks in order to achieve impact and innovation, while maintaining rigorous fiscal standards, environmental and social safeguards. However, various evaluations by the GCF's Independent Evaluation Unit have identified shortcomings in policies and practices that have so far prevented the GCF from achieving this goal.

 At COP26, it is up to the rich industrialized countries to take bold actions to address their collective shortcomings and unfulfilled promises, and to give up on false solutions.

We chronicle here some of the insights and contributions shared by the first cohort of young climate leaders participating in the CLI, including on raising ambition for the climate negotiations as well as recognizing and sharing indigenous and ancestral knowledge from their respective countries in strategies to address the climate emergency.

Differentiating finance types, developing countries’ needs and the lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic

12 December 2020 marks the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Five years after Paris, the climate crisis has worsened, impacting the poorest and most vulnerable countries the worst, and inflicting already severe loss and damage. Signatory states are preparing to submit updated and more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction pledges, the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for Glasgow in 2021 - with the United States under a Biden Administration expected to join in the effort. How can we increase targets to remain below 2 degrees Celsius global warming and finds ways to achieve them in a socially and gender-just manner? What financing contributions are needed to support developing countries? What false solutions must be avoided? And how can we push the urgently needed radical course change in pursuit of climate justice? We explore those questions in various contributions.