 Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for the role of international climate finance, the third briefing in a five part series what Congress needs to know in the lead up to COP26. I'm Dan Berset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We're within two weeks of the start of the 26th conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or COP26. ESI has devoted the entire month of October to providing briefings and related educational resources with the information and insights policymakers and their staff need in the lead up to during and after COP26. I would like to start by acknowledging our honorary co-sponsor, the British Embassy of Washington, and our great partner, the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, for their support and cooperation that make this briefing series possible. The Environmental Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers. More recently we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on bill financing programs for their customers. ESI provides informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics and briefings, written materials on social media, all of our educational resources including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters and podcasts are always available for free online at www.esi.org. The best way to stay informed about our latest educational resources is to subscribe to our biweekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. And as part of our focus on COP26, for the first time we will publish a special daily newsletter during the climate talks, Glasgow Dispatch, to help Congress keep updated on developments at these critical negotiations. You can subscribe to this daily newsletter online at www.esi.org forward slash top news. The briefing series began on October 8 with a conversation featuring Sir Robert Watson and Cristiana Figueres, who discussed the imperative for urgent climate action, and they shared a hopeful outlook for COP26 and beyond. If you missed this briefing, you can review presentation materials and watch the archived webcast at www.esi.org. Last week we convened a panel of climate adaptation and resilience experts who shared an update on initiatives undertaken or expanded since the last meeting of the conference of parties in 2019. Coming up on Friday, October 22, we will look ahead to the negotiations and review the major issues to resolve as countries move ahead with their nationally determined contributions for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. After COP26 on Thursday, November 18, we will convene a briefing for an after-action report about key outcomes and possible next steps. Today, though, is all about international climate finance. And to help get us started, I am very pleased to welcome Kate Hughes, Director for International Climate Change with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy of the United Kingdom. Kate's team supporting clean energy transitions, green finance, sustainable supply chains, and increasing the uptake of electric vehicles. The United Kingdom will assume the COP presidency and is hosting COP26 in Glasgow, and Kate would like to share some introductory remarks with us today before we convene our panel. Kate, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. Well, thank you very much and thank you for inviting me in for that introduction. So yeah, I'm going to give you a bit of an introduction, hopefully set the context for today's conversations and say a bit about climate finance, 100 billion and a bit on the UK experience as well. So public international climate finance has got a really important role to play in reducing global emissions, in supporting countries to adapt and become resilient to climate change, and also in influencing the negotiating dynamics at COPs, particularly this one. It can have huge impact value for money and reach, and it's really catalytic in enabling ambitious climate action and in mobilising trillions of dollars from a wide range of sources that's going to be really fundamental to the scope and scale of this climate transition that we need. As COP26 presidency, we really welcome President Biden's commitment made it hunger to work with Congress to double US climate finance above the levels he set in April, aiming to reach 11.4 billion dollars annually by financial year 24. And we recognise the important role Congress plays in supporting this ambition and appropriating this climate finance annually. The COP presidency calls on you to work with the administration to scale up climate finance over the next three years in a way that maximises its impact in meeting global emissions reduction goals and supporting vulnerable countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change. So a bit of context. Climate finance is one of three key pillars of the Paris Agreement, and countries agreed back in Copenhagen in 2009 to collectively mobilise at least $100 billion annually of climate finance to support developing and emerging economies to reach their climate goals. This was reaffirmed in Paris and also agreed that the goal would run through to 2025. And as COP presidency we're working with countries to reach that goal. This commitment of support from developed countries was made alongside securing the agreement that all countries would put forward nationally determined contributions, underpinning the understanding that all parties are responsible for being as ambitious with their mitigation actions as possible. Demonstrating sufficient progress on the 100 billion goal is critical to refocusing pressure on high-emitting emerging economies to put forward sufficiently ambitious emissions reduction goals and then providing the finance to support this transition. And it's a necessary condition for developing and emerging economies to engage constructively in the COP26 negotiations. So in terms of UK climate finance and our approach, we have committed to doubling our own climate finance to 11.6 billion pounds between 2021 and 2025 with a balance between mitigation and adaptation. Now we've increased our climate finance because it's the right thing to do because of those commitments, but also we see it as in our own national interest. Meeting our international climate finance commitments will require us to spend just a fraction of what we are already spending domestically on our transition. And we know that when the world moves, it will make it quicker, cheaper and easier to deliver on our own net zero targets as well as those global net zero targets. Climate finance is integral to safeguarding the development progress we have all made in the past decades. All of the investments we have made will be reversed if we don't invest in tackling climate change. We also see it as integral and essential to safeguarding our national security. We've all seen increased conflict and migration due to climate change, induced drought, crop failure, natural disasters, and this will only increase if we can't support countries to adapt to climate change. And finally, green markets are the markets of the future. The UK is growing the green industries of the future and we want to support the development of those markets for these industries for decades to come. So the role of public finance is really important, not just in those things I outlined, but also mobilising and catalyzing the trillions that we know are needed in order to get us to global net zero. In supporting the most vulnerable, jump-starting those markets, de-risking investments, but we know it can't fund the transition alone. And in Article 2.1c of the Paris Agreement, all parties committed to making finance loans consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas and climate resilience development. This is needed to catalyse those trillions needed to address climate change, but it's also going to require a fundamental shift in the global financial system. International public finance is a fundamental role to play in this shift, whether it's technical assistance to help set the regulator in investment environment or is that capital risk-bearing tranche. And we've got huge numbers of examples of where UK public finance has catalyzed billions from the private sector, has radically reduced the cost of technologies and shown that pathway to investment that can then be followed without the need for public finance. So it's really great to see there's a variety of vehicles out there for climate finance in the Senate and House draft appropriations bills, including technical assistance through USAID in the State Department, renewable energy, sustainable landscapes and adaptation, as well as contribution to the multilateral funds, including the GCF, the Green Climate Fund, the GF, the Global Environment Facility and the Climate Investment Fund, the CIS, the sorts of acronyms in this area. These are all essential mechanisms in the climate finance landscape, but I want to specifically point out the value of two funds very briefly, the GCF and the CIS. So the GCF, given its demand-driven approach, is a key part of supporting developing countries to access funds for impactful projects and mobilising funds at scale to implement their NDCs, the National Adaptation Plans and other nationally driven sustainable development strategies. The fact that the GCF has programmed well over $3 billion in climate projects since the beginning of the pandemic is a huge success. It's available to all countries, provides support across all areas of mitigation and adaptation, and provides technical assistance. The flexibility and breadth of its work is crucial to those long-term transformations, and we recognise the need to keep on improving the GCF's efficiency and increasing its impact. Alongside this, the CIS, the Climate Investment Fund's sector-specific, programmatic approach, plays a really important and complementary role to the GCF. The CIS dispersed relatively quickly. They work in a streamlined fashion and have a strong track record on blended finance. They've used donor finance to mobilise nine times that amount in additional public MDB and private funding, and we are particularly excited for the joint UK-US leadership in the new Accelerating Coal Transitions program, which we believe can play a key role in supporting a just and rapid transition for emerging economies dependent on coal to grow instead their clean energy economies. So with an issue as complex and wide-ranging as climate change, we need a variety of solutions and interventions. There's definitely no one-size-fits-all approach, but public finance plays a truly catalytic role here. Donors have to work together to maximise impact, and we need to understand the needs of developing countries. While there are quick wins, we also need to provide that predictability and transparency of climate finance so that we can ensure that countries have a certainty to act in the transformative way needed. Thank you. Thank you, Kate, for that. And thanks for joining us today. At the outset of our briefing, and I'm very pleased that you'll be joining us later after our panel to participate in our Q&A. So thank you very much for that. And as we transition to our panel, I would like to call back to something that we discussed on Friday during our briefing. The significant unmet need for finance to address the many challenges of adaptation and helping communities, especially those on the front lines, and disproportionately affected by the effects of global warming improve their resilience. And specifically, we talked on Friday about the idea that not only do we need to mobilize great quantities of dollars to meet the urgency of climate change for adaptation and mitigation, but also that our investments and resources need to use to finance climate change solutions have to be high quality. They have to be high enough quality to ensure that benefits are delivered in an equitable way to maximize the impact of each dollar or pound spent and put into effect and help put into effect a just transition to a decarbonized clean energy global economy taken separately. Those are very tall orders. And together well, you can understand while we're devoting an entire briefing to exploring these topics, really looking forward to our conversation. Before I introduce our first panels, I'd like to let everyone know in our audience that while we'll have the Q&A, and we'll still have an opportunity for you to participate. Even though you won't be joining us in the zoom, those of you watching on website on our website or on YouTube, you can still ask us questions. We have two options for doing that. The first is by following us on Twitter at EESI online. You can also send us an email. The email address to use is AskASK at EESI.org. If you have questions, please feel free to send them our way. We'll do our best to incorporate them into the discussion. And now let me introduce our panel. Our first panelist is Bella Tonkinogi. She is a sustainable finance expert who leads the Climate Policy Initiative's US based team. Since joining CPI, she has played a leading role in the global innovation lab for climate finance through serving on the core management and strategy team supporting the development of innovative climate finance instruments and renewable energy climate risk and forestry and understanding the lab's impact. Bella also develops and guides key CPI programs and initiatives such as the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance and manages projects to improve the effectiveness of climate finance more broadly. Bella, welcome to our panel today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Great. Thank you so much, Dan. It's really a pleasure to be here today. So just to introduce a little bit CPI. So we are an analysis and advisory organization. We work with governments, businesses, and financial institutions to drive economic growth while addressing climate change and our main deep expertise is in climate finance and policy. So thank you all so much again. I'm going to go ahead and get started. So what I'm going to talk about today, three things. So first, what is climate finance? Second, why does international climate finance matter? We heard a little bit about that from Kate. So I'm just going to add a little bit to that. And then finally, how do we make public climate investment effectively? So first, what is climate finance? So I just want to start by saying climate finance is about making real investments. It's about real economy, about enabling activities that mitigate climate change or support adaptation to climate change. This can mean clean energy, be land use, disastrous management cities, resilient infrastructure, sustainable energy access. It runs quite a wide gamut of investment opportunities. Then it's important to understand what we mean when we talk about climate finance because different people come with different perspectives, and they may call something climate finance that another person might think is defining it in a different way. So there are a few ways that we have defined climate finance. So sort of at the narrowest scope is what we're talking about today, which is international public climate finance. These are flows that go from developed countries to developing countries to support climate action in those countries. A little bit more broadly thinking about climate finance, we can also think about public climate finance more broadly. So this is in addition to international public climate finance, these are domestic climate finance flows. This is our national governments, our local governments investing in projects in their own country. This is actually a bigger category of climate finance. And then finally zooming out again, we can talk about private climate finance, and that's the investments that commercial banks are making, that institutional investors are making, that corporations are making, and that you and I are making when we purchase energy efficient appliances or battery electric vehicles. So CPI takes the totality of that whole box when we assess what we call global climate finance flows to really understand and draw a picture of what is happening around the world in terms of climate finance. I'm just going to present to you some of that data today just to give you the context for the discussion. So first let me present to you what we call a Sankey diagram which shows the life cycle of climate investment. So this is something that we have produced since 2011. What you can see on the top is that we have for 2019 and 2020 we have counted $632 billion of investment annually. That's an average across 2019 and 2020. And this data is actually recently released. We've just released it on Monday. So moving from left to right, you can see the sources of climate finance. So the public sector in blue, the private sector in orange. You can see the uses of that or the instruments of that climate finance and what are grants, what's going through as either concessional or market rate debt, and then in terms of equity, as well as balance sheet financing. So you move again to the right and you see the uses of that finance between mitigation and adaptation. And finally, the destination in terms of sectors of that finance, whether it's going to renewable energy, land use, water and wastewater. Let me just dive into a little bit more of those results. So in this last study that we just released on Monday, we found that mitigation finance continues to dominate globally with over a 90% share of total climate finance. So of that renewable energy around the world is the highest share of mitigation finance, and a majority of that is privately finance, reflecting the commercialization of renewable energy in many, many countries. The next category is transportation finance. What we're seeing is that transportation finance is growing faster than renewable energy finance right now and that's largely accounted for by the growth in battery electric vehicles around the world. And then what we see in terms of adaptation finance is that it is a small share of total climate finance about 7%. Almost all of that is financed by public actors. It is increasing. It increased actually by 50% from our last study 2017-2018, but it is still a small overall share. Now, climate finance globally is growing. It has been growing through the course of our study, which has which started in 2011. But what we are seeing right now is that that climate finance is actually the growth is slowing. So you're seeing almost a plateauing of climate finance year on year. It only increased 10% from our last study versus previous year on year growth rates of closer to 25%. This is especially worrying because we're not seeing yet COVID-19 impact on climate finance, which we expect to observe in the next couple years. We also see that climate finance is still a is still a small portion of the total investment needed to actually limit global warming to 1.5 C. So there's still a significant gap when you zoom out of the year on your numbers and compare to the investment needs. There's a very significant gap for a successful low carbon transition. And that is that is paralleled in adaptation finance where current adaptation finance flows fall well short of estimated annual needs through 2030. So let's then talk about why international climate finance matters. This is I wanted to present to you the context in which international public climate finance sits. So why does it matter Kate mentioned a number of reasons that it matters. First, climate change stands to reverse many of the development gains that countries have made. And that is a standalone point. But from a US centric perspective that can also contribute to increasing instability globally. It can affect the US directly for example by supply chain disruptions and we've already become far too familiar with the consequences of that right now in this post COVID economy. Second, also from a US perspective for us to be able to meet global climate change goals, we need action from developing countries. So this figure on the right is taken from some modeled results where they show that 39% of the effort needs to come from developing countries including India and smaller emitting developing countries so that does not that 39% does not include China which is another 30%. So from a climate perspective and resulting economic perspective the US will be impacted if developing countries can't reduce their emissions. So, then what do we know about climate finance flows that are going to these countries that need to act both on mitigation and adaptation well I think what you can see in this chart is that the vast majority of climate finance flows are concentrated in East Asian Pacific which is really China, Western Europe and US and Canada and you can I the other thing you can see is that for those three regions, the vast vast majority of climate finance flows are domestic. But when you look at sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America and Caribbean and Central Asia, they're far more dependent on international finance flows those dark, the dark red bars in the in the bar chart so for those regions about half of their climate finance is coming from abroad. That's both public and private investment. And so if we want those countries to act this is where international climate finance is absolutely critical these are the regions that it targets. And without this international climate finance we're going to have a much these regions are going to have a much more challenging time of reaching their targets. So, let me just finish by talking about effectiveness and public investment. So, when we think about the climate investment gap and kind of thinking about this context of overall climate finance and the rectangle that is international public climate finance. We can understand first that public sources do need to increase further there's a massive investment gap, especially for developing countries. But there those sources are not going to scale to the levels needed so public finance together with public policy also needs to increase its effectiveness, both at mobilizing private investment so shifting those trillions, as well as supporting the most vulnerable countries that have the highest climate risks in the lowest capacity to address them. And so here on this slide I've just put a few areas where I think that those public resources can be most effectively deployed so first in enabling environment areas like policy reform market environment, developing directly project pipelines are actually helping countries and cities and product developers develop adequate pipeline for investment. And then finally, for finance, financing vehicles themselves really using the public sources of finance to de risk investment, for example in early stage technologies or first time deployments or to address some of the risks that are very prevalent in developing countries. Local currency risk, and that this this finance is public finance as Kate mentioned is really delivered by diversity of sources and diversity of instruments from the multi lateral development bags from bilateral DFI like the US DFC for bilateral aid agencies like USA they all have a role to play and the most important things that they work together. So let me just end by talking just bringing it back to reality out of the abstract and back to the ground. So, you know, why do we work on international climate finance this is a company that I worked with a couple years ago through the global innovation that the climate finance is called commas. And what they're doing in Kenya is that they are they work with small hunter farmers to help them plant trees, so that those trees can be used as sources for local wood and and other paper products. It can help to restore degraded land and it can help diversify the income sources of those farmers. What this company is trying to do is scale up. Forestry is a very risky business anywhere, especially in developing countries in Kenya, commercial debt is very expensive. And so this company has come up with a new way to finance their business model, which is basically to refinance their trees. And they have really interesting US connections their founder is from the US there they have a number of US investors they are planning to submit a project to the Green Climate Fund for approval and they have huge impact in terms of the number of farmers that they are reaching the number of hectares that they are planting. The advanced technology that they're bringing to Kenya, and these are the kinds of investments that really will make a difference in many, many countries and really is why we undertake and really support international climate finance. So thank you so much and back over to you Dan. Thank you Bella for that excellent presentation. It's always nice when the first speaker has such great slides because that is a great reminder to me to remind everyone in our audience that in addition to the webcast being available online after today's briefing. So we'll all of the presentation materials, as well as links to all of the organizations that our panelists represent so you'd like to go back and look at Bella slides and a little bit more detail. You can always do that by visiting us online at www.hesi.org because they were very good slides. Our next panelist is Ricardo Noguera. He is an expert on climate finance international development and sustainable investing. Rick's clients include major philanthropies governments and multilateral development banks. Rick is also a member of the board of Washington DC's green finance authority the first municipal green bank in the United States. And Rick is a member of the green climate funds independent technical advisor panel, which advises the GCF board on all funding decisions. Rick, welcome. Nice to see you today and I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thank you very much then hopefully just to confirm everybody can see the slides. Yep, they look great. Great. So maybe at the outset, as Dan mentioned, I'm part of the independent technical advisory panel GCF, which effectively acts as a cross between an investment committee advisory board where we look at the proposals that the GCF is considering funding and provide kind of an independent view on them. So I note that because at the outset I just want to say that my presentation today as well as any responses I may have for questions or wholly my own and not the GCX, notwithstanding that I do have a professional connection to them. But what I want to do over the next 12 minutes or so is just to provide some of the basics of what the green climate fund is and how it came to be and what the history of it is. But it's very much a superficial touching on it and there's lots more information available on the GCF website, which I encourage you to look at to actually quite transparent of a website with loads of information on the projects that they support as well as there's processes. The concept of the GCF really came out of the Copenhagen cop back in 2010 as Kate mentioned in her opening remarks, you know, there were a few financial pillars that were established and that really paid the kind of diplomatic path to the to the Paris and a few years down the road and one of them in addition to the hundred billion commitment. One big one was establishing a sole purpose international funding vehicle to support developing countries, meet their climate ambitions, and that is what the green climate fund was. The basic premise behind it is that the world will continue to develop including developing countries roads will be built cities will grow population will grow. And the trick is to figure out how to make sure that that's happening in a way that's compatible with the climate crisis. So, shifting that paradigm growth to reflect the need for a low carbon future and a more resilient future. So the concept broadly was that another major driver and I'll put you upon it in a little detail later for more detail later was, there was a, there was a feeling from developing countries that what was needed was a vehicle that was demand driven meaning that the projects that they were funding and the activities that were being supported were those that developing countries themselves identified as being aligned with their needs. There was a sense rightfully or wrongfully that often climate finance from the past it was coming from multilateral bilateral had a little bit of a top down field to here would be a vehicle that they would have a stronger voice. So, once, once it was agreed to establish this work began immediately on coming up with a government instrument which is effectively chartered a constitution. These concepts that I mentioned in terms of country ownership in terms of paradigm shift are in others are reflected there and then they moved to a first board meeting in 2012 so as you see it was quite rapid. So we had to build the human capacity around this institution. So the green climate fund itself team that runs it's roughly maybe nearing 200 folks today is based in Songdo, Korea, so just outside Seoul, and all that was happening through the early 20s of the 20 teams right so this is coming up with the rules of the road how the GCF is going to operate and then building out its its teams and building out its structure. Once that became robust enough to GCF received its first pledges of funding. It was a little over 10 billion in US dollars 10.4 billion US dollars the US under the Obama administration pledge, three billion as part of that amount uniquely and reflecting where the thinking was going internationally on climate finance and eventually reflected in the Paris government itself is those pledges came from all sorts of countries, not just those that were deemed to be developed countries back in 1992 when the UNFCCC was put together for really kind of a broader set of countries and I believe even nine or 10 developing countries ended up participating in that pledge. And once, once the pledge was in place, the fund immediately started working on approving projects, and in fact, the very very first set of project approvals happened just before the final negotiations got underway. So it was a rapid rapid growth from concept to operations with lots of learning built in and it is a continuing learning and improving entity. And as we continue to deploy capital in 2019, the GCF has gone back for its first replenishment of funding and is run that process and is raising additional 9.4 roughly 9.4 billion dollars. So what has it done with them. So this is it just came out actually a couple weeks ago GCF put out kind of a summary of where the funding has gone. And as you see they, you know, they've touched upon over 100 plus developing countries, they've approved projects in about the 10 billion mark. Another project you know as you've heard in some of the earlier discussions, often this funding is intended to mobilize other sources of funding so they've typically have co financing or expect to mobilize some of the sources, which is about 27 additional billion dollars as part of that 10 billion. And in total 139 projects today have been approved. So there's a sense of where the projects are located to across developing countries, developing world. And above you kind of get a sense of the mix between adaptation mitigation and cross cutting, which means that there's an aspect of mitigation and adaptation in that project. So, I'm going to go take a step back and kind of talk a little bit about what makes the GCF unique, and some of the things you've seen in your website or maybe you know more sense. In my mind, I think there may be four things that stand out at the GCF both from its Genesis and the way it operates now. One is the concept of being country or demand driven. And that really means that in its governance design, as well as its operational design, then the onus and is on developing countries in terms of determining what they believe they need. So decision making at the GCF level is very much a shared endeavor between developing developed countries. I'll give you three kind of examples. One is there's a board that runs the GCF that is the ultimate decision maker. It's made up of 24 seats, which are evenly split between developing developing country by the charter of the GCF itself. There are 12 developing seats, developing country seats and 12 developed country seats. And for the most part, they, they try to operate in consensus and for a long time that was actually the GCF that the decision making was made at a consensus level. So that gives developing countries a much, much stronger voice in how the vehicle is established and what sort of things get funding then, then, then other international climate finance efforts. A second area that is absolutely critical and unique to the GCF, it's, it's, I'm skipping down to the bottom here. It's its focus on adaptation or at least the role that adaptation finance plays. As you heard from Bella, adaptation is a relatively small part of total international climate finance, but it's, but it's a critical part in terms of what the needs are developing countries. So the GCF has built into its charter built into its DNA, that it will seek to finance 5050 between mitigation and adaptation or some wrinkles on how that's measured. But on the whole, that is the point to take away that it's 50% adaptation focus 50% mitigation focus as a goal. The adaptation side of it is also has a target of half of that so 25% of total to be focused on the least developed countries so the poorest countries in the world, as well as a small island developing states so those that are at most risk in the short term to climate impacts. That is a critical piece to how the GCF operates and how it decides on what type of projects it's going to fund. A third kind of key, very key piece is that it has it recognizes in its charter that if you are to be serious about climate change in developing countries, and you look at the gap between the funding that's needed and what can actually be done public with public money. So the only way you're going to fill that gap is by figuring out how to mobilize private sector finance. So to that end, there is a private sector facility which is a standalone team that houses a set of expertise is expertise into GCF that's designed to work with the private sector to figure out that puzzle right so how it can best use the concessional money that GCF has in order to unlock those flows in order to crowd private sector funding into these developing countries and into investments that are more difficult where you're producing resilience impacts. Those are the paradigm shift I mentioned before. Those are kind of the key unique things that make the GCF stand out relative to other sources of international climate finance. Now how does it work? As I mentioned, there's a team in Korea that looked across the world and they work together with countries to kind of figure out what their needs are and what sort of projects they want to prioritize. The GCF itself does not provide funding directly for projects. It works through intermediaries that act as fiduciaries for the GCF. Those are called accredited entities. So these vary from direct access entities, meaning entities that belong to a developing country in some way. So let's say it's a domestic development bank as an example in developing country or civil society organization that's set in the developing country to on the other end, large private sector players can become accredited as well as all the large multi lateral development banks at this point in time of credit. So the GCF uses that as a force multiple hire to leverage their expertise and their relationships in these countries and also so that the GCF can be at a manageable and efficient size of the way it uses its money through accredited entities. And then the accredited entities themselves acting on behalf of the GCF are the ones that manage the investments in the projects or the programs directly, always again always in collaboration with the local developing country. That's typically represented to a national designated authority so that's an entity in the developing country that's assigned to be the counterpart GCF. No projects GCF can do no projects in the developing country, unless it has the written approval of those MBAs in this country. And then the projects themselves the GCF can use a variety of tools from grants to loans to guarantees to even providing direct equity. So, as I mentioned it works through accredited entities. I apologize this list is a little bit at a date, maybe from two years ago or so then we'll more this slide. Today, currently I believe there are 110 the credit entities to become an accredited entity I should say it is a it is an intense process where you demonstrate that you have the ability to manage money in a way that's reliable and governance and also at the same time the ability to actually create the impacts that are needed in these countries so this gives you a sense. To go to the website as I mentioned, you'll be able to get a more fuller view of all the accredited entities are what their levels of risk that they can take on what's the size of the projects that they can take on and whether they're focused on individual countries regions or have a broader international focus. How does it operate in the most simplest terms countries, often working with an accredited entity will will evaluate what their needs are, then they will generate a proposal that they believe meets the investment criteria to GCF, and they will submit that proposal through an accredited entity to create entity ultimately the intermediary those proposals that undergo extensive due diligence and kind of back and forth negotiation between the GCF staff in Korea and and sponsors. It then goes through an independent review that's that itap panel that I mentioned early on, and then ultimately the kind of gets through the entire process and will go to the board for final approval and report approval, eventually into final contracts and implementation. So I just trying to capture some of the, what does the GCF look at right so the GCF, as others have mentioned the understanding importance of crowding additional finance. That's a big, that's a big set of impact that is looking for it's a mobilization impact. We also look at climate rationale. To make sure that everything that the GCF does is really has climate in the forefront. There could be other benefits and development benefits to a lot of the activity but unlike other entities around the world that have various remits the GCF really sees itself as having a soul principle of climate and creating mitigation outcomes and adaptation outcomes in developing countries. So the climate rationale is, is taken very seriously. And again the country driven approach right so does the country really want this, you have the letters in place as they've been a stakeholder process that demonstrates that this is really the needs of the country and it's part of what the country is helping accomplish. So we've measured again six investment criteria that are listed there. And the type of projects are also looked at the GCF looks at kind of fit in eight result area. So, if you look at those results areas and you look at the six investment criteria and taking into account the principles that discussed that kind of gives you a sense of the sort of stuff that the GCF does. And again I encourage you to look at the website and get a sense of the individual projects themselves. And if I have a couple minutes which maybe I do there are some misconceptions about the GCF that I hear often, and even have seen it in in the paper location so if you have these misconceptions are not alone. And maybe this is this is an education. What is the hundred billion, you will often see the hundred billion completed with the GCF. And people will say it's a hundred billion fund or that the GCF is supposed to get to 100 billion. That's not accurate, nowhere in the city or power screen rating or is that established with the GCF is part of the puzzle to get to the hundred billion. It's supposed to have a catalytic role in helping get to the hundred billion target both the 2020 target that existed pre-Paris and other new targets out in 2025, but itself it's not a hundred billion dollar fund. It's not expected to be a hundred billion. I'm sure they'd be happy to be a hundred billion dollar fund and but that is not what's what is part of the design. It often mistakenly gets referred to as a UN entity. The GCF is a standalone entity with its own legal personality. It is not part of the UN system. Whether the employees are not UN employees, they don't, you know, they don't have the same sort of protection some UN employees have. It really is by design, supposed to be independent or have some independence from the UN and UNF triple C process. That scene as a positive. Now, at same time, it's quite related right to the UNF triple C process. It takes guidance from the UNF triple C process. It reports back to it. And it's a financial mechanism of the Paris Agreement. So the Paris Agreement recognizes the GCF as a critical tool to meeting the finance goals. But it isn't as sometimes it's in common knowledge people are the UN entity and maybe the third final misconception I hear often and hopefully clear up is sometimes when you talk and this is more misconception developing countries. There's a sense that every country has an allocation in the GCF a sense that, you know, let's say you are country X that some percentage of that GCF money should go to that country at some formal or informal allocation. And that's not the case other international vehicles who operate on an allocation method. The GCF doesn't. And part of the reason is so that it can actually look across the globe to figure out where we can have the highest impact for dollars inside the results areas that are listed here and that's the criteria. And with that, I'll end the day. Thank you, Rick, for your great presentation and for clearing up those misconceptions. I think it's always great to have things, especially in a session like this which like you said, educational reaching people who may only just be hearing about the GCF. I think that was really helpful. Thank you for that reminder about questions. There are two ways you can ask questions. And then we'll do our best to work them into our Q&A. The first is by following us online on Twitter at EESI online. You can also send us an email ask ASK at EESI.org and we're already getting a couple so thank you very much for that we'll do our best to work them in. Our third panelist today is Joe Thwaites. He is an associate with the World Resources Institute Sustainable Finance Center. His work focuses on enhancing the climate finance ambition of developing developed countries, supporting climate vulnerable countries and their engagement in international financial policymaking and ensuring a just transition in the shift from fossil to clean energy. Joe, welcome. I will turn it over to you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dan, just sharing my screen. I hope everyone can see that. So World Resources Institute is a global research institute and we work at the intersection of environment and development. We have offices all over the world and programs on cities, climate, energy, food, forests, oceans and water, as well as centers that focus on business, economics, equity and finance. And I, as Dan said, based in the finance center. So today I'm going to look at Zoom back out again after Rick's great overview of the Green Climate Fund to look at some of the international commitments we've already heard a little bit about. Look at how the US compares to other countries. And then the relevant appropriations accounts that the US can use to meet its international climate finance pledges. So to start with, I did want to look just based on the US government's own terms at how they define climate finance and it's relatively similar to the other definitions you've heard but I think it's worth showing here. Essentially, it's about funding to help developing countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions and or adapt to the impacts of climate change. I've also talked about why provide international climate finance. Firstly, it's about fulfilling international responsibilities. The US is the largest cumulative greenhouse gas emitter. And I'll discuss some of the commitments that that the US is collectively signed up to a little later. But as others have said, climate finance is also a strategic investment in a cleaner and more resilient world. It enhances US credibility and influence internationally. But simply, it's easier to get other countries on board when you're fulfilling your own obligations and showing a willingness to support them in taking on more ambitious action. And at a time when China is ramping up its overseas financing, including for climate, it's also a question of whether the US can maintain its global influence by providing attractive investment packages to developing countries to do more. Third, integrating climate considerations early on is good development practice, ensuring better outcomes for the poorest and most vulnerable communities around the world. There's growing awareness of the many ways in which climate impacts can undermine development gains that we've seen over the last half century. And so making sure that interventions are designed to be resilient to a heating world and don't lock countries into unsustainable energy pathways can save money. Certainly compared to a traditional development finance approach where you would do that project and then maybe come back later to climate proof it. If you integrate climate up front, it can potentially save money. Fourth, climate funding boosts US export markets for clean technology. And out of the top 30 markets for US renewable energy exports, more than a half of those are eligible to receive funding from the Green Climate Fund. And there's also directly supporting projects that have been implemented by US companies such as Acumen Fund and Pegasus Capital Advisors. Those are a couple of US based entities that are accredited to the GCF and Ricardo went over a lot more of those entities, but there are certainly a handful of US based companies and NGOs that can access GCF funding and implement projects. And lastly, climate finance reduces the severity and costs of climate impacts for vulnerable countries. And by shoring up on stable areas of the world, which have left unaddressed, they might present national security threats. So dealing with this upfront can certainly be better for everyone involved, taking a preventative measure rather than having to react once crises become potentially even conflicts. And climate finance can also address some of the root causes of migration. So I mentioned and others have already talked about international commitments that the US is part of and the key one is the 100 billion commitment that as Kate mentioned was part of the Copenhagen Accord. Together with 22 other developed countries, the US committed jointly to mobilizing $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020. And then in Paris, they agreed to continue that mobilization level through to 2025. And again, as Ricardo I think very hopefully pointed out that the commitment includes an acknowledgement that it can come from a wide variety of sources, public, private, bilateral, multilateral and alternative sources. So it's not just about delivering all through the Green Climate Fund. It's great when money does go through the GCF, but there are plenty of other channels and they all can play their role in fulfilling this goal. And then the other thing to say about this just to sort of contextualize it is that this is 100 billion a year is about 0.7% of the $15 trillion that developed countries announced in fiscal stimulus to respond to the pandemic. So despite being a relatively modest amount in the grand scheme of global financial flows, progress towards the goal has not been going particularly well. I think it's fair to say a few weeks ago, the OECD released its latest assessment with figures up to 2019 that showed that countries were still about $20 billion short of that goal. And that was before the pandemic hit and obviously there was a considerable disruption as Bella pointed out to global financial flows. So it's hard to say where 2020 will land. That reporting will come in at the start of next year. But it's widely expected that the goal was probably missed in 2020 and that doesn't provide the best opener for the COP26 climate talks that will begin next week. The goal was 100 billion annually though, so developed countries can still deliver and ideally make up for any shortfall in 2020 and 2021. And to help identify what needs to be done at WRI we recently released an analysis looking at how much each country was contributing as of 2018. The US was the third largest contributor in absolute terms behind Germany and Japan and about level with France. But it's important to point out that the US economy is more than four times the size of Japan's five times Germany's and seven times France's. So if you were to look at provision as a share of gross national income, the US actually ranked dead last at 0.03%. And if every country were to make the same effort relative to the size of their economies to reach the hundred billion goal, they'd need to provide at least 0.18% of their gross national income and that's assuming that the 80 billion of the goal comes from public sources and the remaining 20 billion comes from private sources. But in terms of the public commitments that would equate to 0.18%. So the US would have a long way to go there. There are other ways of assessing effort. The obligation to provide climate finances is rooted both in developed countries larger share of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, but also their greater relative wealth, compared at least to most of the poorer countries. And a number of researchers have produced effort sharing formulae that use different kinds of objective indicators including greenhouse gas emissions GDP or gross national income, as well as population, their aid contributions and other metrics. And the sort of the big picture takeaway here is that the US fair share of the hundred billion climate finance effort would be between 40 and 47% of the total. So if that total is 80 billion in public finance, then the shortfall is at least $21 billion per year from the US alone. And under every effort sharing approach the US shortfall is more than double the combined shortfalls of all other countries. So there's quite a long way to go, at least according to some of these approaches to how one would divide up the effort. The other dimension to consider, and there's already been a lot of discussion on this so far, which is great, is the need to scale up adaptation finance, which historically has not received as much attention as funding for mitigation or emissions reductions. And this shows how each country is performing in terms of their balance between adaptation, mitigation finance and then cross cutting finance in red is finance that tackles both objectives. So you can see that some countries are actually doing pretty well, approaching or even exceeding 50% in adaptation which is the yellow portion of the bar. But the US is around a quarter of its funding is going to adaptation and developing countries have been asking for much more to help them adapt to the increasingly severe climate impacts. It's also in the Paris agreement there was a commitment to balance finance between mitigation adaptation and balance doesn't necessarily mean exactly 5050 but I think it's it's clear that a quarter is not not particularly balanced. The Biden administration has heared some of these calls and last month, pledge to increase US climate finance to 11.4 billion dollars per year by 2024. That's a quadrupling of the amount the Obama administration is providing so a really significant increase, it would make the US, the single largest country contributing climate finance. And it will help get developed countries on track to meeting the $100 billion a year goal, although probably not for another couple of years at best. But to be clear the US won't be out on a limb here, most of the countries will still be contributing more relative to the size of their economies. And as a comparison here the European Union, collectively, all the EU member states were already providing more than double what the US has pledged to do by 2024 in 2019. The Biden administration also committed to scaling up adaptation finance sixfold, which again is a really significant effort and really significant increase. But unfortunately given the overall increase in total climate finance which again is a good thing. But it has meant that that share of total climate finance will still be only around a quarter. So there could be more attention there to how to better scale up adaptation finance even more and potentially lessons to be learned from some of the multilateral funds that have integrated commitments on this. And when Biden made the pledge he was very clear about the need to work with Congress to ensure it is delivered. And so I'm going to end by looking at key appropriations accounts for international climate funding. And they all fall under the state and foreign operations bill. These graphs show the last six fiscal years plus or sorry the last five fiscal years, plus the President's budget request and the House and Senate versions of the FY 22 bill. The Senate version was released on Monday so this is very very new new figures we're dealing with. And I've split them into multilateral on the left and bilateral on the right. Multilateral accounts include a variety of international institutions, the largest of which is the green climate funders as Ricardo already discussed in a lot of detail. The other funds include the global environment facility that has been around for over a quarter of a century, the clean technology fund of the climate investment funds that Kate mentioned in her introductory comments, as well as the Montreal Montreal protocol multilateral fund, and this helps developing countries to reduce ozone depleting chemicals. Many of those are potent greenhouse gases so this is a case of being able to kill two birds with one stone so to speak. And it also includes the funding for the UN climate convention and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is, which is the diplomatic and the scientific bodies of the UN, respectively, that are key to sort of tracking global climate investments and also providing the venue where, where COPs happen, where COP26 will be hosted and providing that space for countries to come together and negotiate greater ambition on climate finance. On the bilateral side, there are three key accounts for adaptation for renewable energy and for sustainable landscapes. And this funding is primarily delivered through the US Agency for International Development and the State Department. I'm sure Shashi will talk more about what USAID has been doing, doing with those allocations. As you see, sustainable landscapes has long been in the appropriations bills. And this concerns forestry, better land management, things like that. But the other the other two accounts were first added by Congress in 2019. And this really reflected a concern that the Trump administration would not voluntarily fund these activities, as the Obama administration had been doing. And it was an example of Congress using its power of the purse to ensure that no matter who is in the White House, more get spent on on climate so that was really, really welcome. And as you'll see the Biden administration across both multilateral and bilateral accounts significantly increased the amount requested for climate finance to around 2.7 billion in total. The House and Senate bills increase these further to 2.8 and 3.1 billion dollars respectively. And as this is a positive signal ahead of COP26, Congress is focused on how to deliver the 11.4 billion that Biden pledged by 2024. Now things are going to move to the conference committee and congressional leadership will determine the final spending levels, but we do hope that these kind of levels can can can hold in the final appropriations bill. One last thing to note is there are a few other channels of US climate finance, not captured here, that is funding through multilateral development banks, and through the US Development Finance Corporation. And the reason for that is these appropriations go to their core funding for these institutions, only a portion ultimately gets used for for climate projects. So it's not possible to say upfront how much exactly that will be. But for the MDBs in 2018 the US share with about $4 billion of their climate finance and the DFC set a target of a third of its investments from FY23 onwards to go to climate projects. So, based on the DFC's current portfolio that would equate to about 1.5 billion a year for climate, and may go up in if DFC's overall portfolio expands. These channels will be very important to help the US meet its climate finance goals, but there is also a need to significantly increase appropriations and Congress has shown that it's focused on that. And so that's good, but it certainly needs more effort and more, more ramping up in the coming years. But I just wanted to finish by saying obviously search support really does pay dividends by reducing the severity and cost of climate impacts for people, including extreme weather ecosystem loss and societal instability. And that's both at home and abroad climate change is a global problem. So tackling it globally can also reap benefits back home. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. We were just commenting in our Slack channel that you have a very strong slide game. Those are excellent slides that put the appropriations in great context. And along with Rick's excellent slides explaining how the GCF is structured and decisions are made and Bella slides about how these dollars move and where they're focused. Really excellent presentation materials today. If anyone would like to go back and take a look at Joe slides, Rick slides or Bella slides. Of course, everything is available online at www.esi.org. It is now my privilege to introduce our fourth panelist of the day. Sashi Jayatiliki is a senior climate finance advisor with the US Agency for International Development Center for Energy, Environment and Infrastructure. Sashi leads the agency's climate finance plan previously. She was a managing director with USAID's private sector engagement hub and provided technical and strategic advice to USAID missions. I think I said aid before but USAID's missions on development finance impact investing and entrepreneurship. Sashi, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me here, Dan. And I feel like I don't have very good slides game at all because I have no slides today. I'm sorry. But actually, I think my panelists ahead of me have really laid out the case quite well. And so I will try not to repeat any of what was said but try to add on and compliment with a little bit of a preview of what will be announced in the next announced in at COP26 in two weeks. So I'll just give you a sense of what we've been doing for the last, I guess, nine months as we really try to embrace the administration's objectives to elevate our work in climate across our entire portfolio. And in the words of President Biden, you know, this is the number one issue facing humanity and as the principal US foreign assistance agency, USAID is well positioned to support the administration's bold agenda and implement the Paris Agreement. We have really made climate a core priority for our entire agency, and we are currently working across every single bureau to look at how we can integrate climate goals across our portfolio. And so that speaks to the slide that, you know, was just presented by Joe on the earmarks that were allocated by Congress to ensure that there is consistent programming in three specific areas, adaptation, renewable energy and sustainable landscapes. But we also want to see all of our work in economic growth in governance and agriculture, also contributing to climate goals. And so part of the exercise we've been undergoing over the summer is talking to key stakeholders like those on the call here today, and in Congress to find out how we can position ourselves to really help prevent worst case climate scenarios. Currently, we have programming in about 45 countries totaling about $360 million. That's taking those earmarks that Joe showed earlier. But as I said, we want it to be a collective effort moving forward. And we want to do this in an alliance with both our global partners in the north and south. And ensure that we're doing this in a way that allows ownership to our partners in the developing world. For us addressing climate change we believe can cut economic costs through more efficient use of energy natural resources and natural resources, and eventually reduce the cost related to more frequent climate related disasters. For that, for that reason tackling the climate crisis can actually provide enormous economic benefits for Americans, providing new jobs, economic competitiveness, and ensuring that communities and workers can benefit from the transition to a new clean energy economy. For us developing international markets for clean technologies and climate friendly solutions will also promote opportunities for Americans. Foreign assistance for climate solutions as mentioned earlier by my prior panelists will minimize the negative impacts that drive displacement and migration such as food and water and security. And so what do we think is needed as you all know President Biden expressed his intention to increase public climate finance developing countries to around 11.4 billion dollars. We hope to work closely with Congress to meet these goals, but it's important to remember that you know finance doesn't mean just raising money it also actually means solving problems. And so we are looking at ways to mobilize resources and direct funding to solutions on the ground that actually have impact and drive change and are accessible to climate vulnerable communities and countries. We want to use our investments to scale up our prior work in renewable energy, transform agriculture to make food systems more climate resilient and update infrastructure needs to reduce the risk of future disasters. In some ways, we see this as expanding markets for our own job opportunities here, and the failure to act globally will have serious consequences here locally. At COP26 will be launching a new climate strategy for public comment. This strategy is based on our history and best practices of working in climate mitigation and adaptation, but also pursuing structural and systems changes in order to meet the goals of net zero emissions by mid century, and to build resilience in climate vulnerable countries. We hope to work with the most vulnerable to reduce climate risks, including local farmers, as well as working with national governments and everyone in between to ensure the food, water, health and infrastructure systems are resilient to the impacts of a changing climate. How will we do this? As the lead federal agency for international disaster assistance, we also want to work to improve disaster preparedness in the face of climate hazards, and hope that these investments will save lives and money. For us, every dollar we invest in climate adaptation and preparedness over the next decade will yield at least three times the return and net benefits. And to confront these complex challenges, the new climate strategy is quite ambitious and employs a whole of energy, a whole of agency approach to tackle climate change. And that means doing our own part in terms of internal reforms to reduce emissions from our operations and safeguard our facilities from climate risk. We're also embedding in our strategy principles of equity, inclusion and locally led development to ensure that the voices that hopefully need to be heard are able to be heard, as well as holding ourselves accountable for those results by announcing them to the world at COP26. We want our partners to work with us hand in hand to ensure that what we are doing is meeting best practices and owned by our local country counterparts. And we also want to complement and reinforce the work of our interagency partners, including the State Department, the DFC and MCC. We are taking advantage of our field presence to leverage the expertise of other agencies like the Department of Energy and Transportation, but also to hopefully work with American science and innovation and transfer those learnings to the countries we work in. So we integrate climate risk management across all the sectors of our work. We're guiding our agency through climate considerations and priorities across development and humanitarian assistance. And that means identifying ways that every single sector can contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation results, and helping communities to prepare both through our missions in the field, as well as through our Bureau of Education in Washington. While keeping in mind that climate change does disproportionately impact vulnerable communities, especially Indigenous peoples, women and girls and youth. We are trying very carefully to ensure and integrate gender equity and climate justice considerations into all our climate change programming. These are new additions to our work in climate change from the prior 10 years. In addition, as you saw that we are a part of the White House's first ever international climate finance plan. And as my prior, as Bella had shared, you know, climate finance is not just public finance, it's also working to mobilize the trillions that are sitting on the sidelines of finance that can be invested in the countries we work in. So we are trying to build on our experience globally of mobilizing private finance to reduce the risks involved of getting private sector partnerships in the countries we work in. And holding our private sector partners to higher development standards, environmental safeguards and social safeguards. Social blended finance is not new to the agency. It does need to be structured in a way that can be used to support climate outcome. And such as, and as well as building on some of the new learnings and solutions in adaptation and nature based solutions. I'm obviously with our partners at the DFC for this to see where is that risk spectrum that perhaps is too high for the DFC too high for multilateral climate funds, and perhaps too complicated for for the funds that are already out there. Can USAID come in and support early stage design. Can we support enabling conditions, and specifically can we build capacity in these countries to be able to access these funds. We hope to leverage an average of $20 mobilize for every dollar of USAID funding put in for private plan to mobilizing private finance. And we hope to bring in multiple stakeholders in these discussions we have the convening power to bring colleagues from the private sector US government agencies and partner governments to attract and deploy the necessary financing and achieve transformational scale. We also see communities that have investable projects but without the ability to communicate to investors in the language that they need. We see businesses aware of the climate challenge but straining to identify the positive impact that's needed to perhaps attract investors and financial returns. We want to bridge this gap and see capital flow to meet the needs of our green recovery. We hope to support additional tools technology methodologies and platforms that help the business and multi stakeholder communities to speak the same language and unlock those trillions of dollars of financing needed for climate solutions. Four specific ways we hope to do this is by building the pipeline of credible businesses, assisting partner countries to access climate finance and meet requirements for the GCF and other funds, structuring private financial vehicles to leverage public funds for greater development impact and supporting the financing of underserved sectors and underserved communities through multiple risk management tools. We have history of already mobilizing finance through this type of work over four years of work of building conditions for investment and that's historically mobilized over 28 billion, according to our standard indicators. And that's such as programs such as Power Africa and Asia Edge, but we really see an opportunity with Fortune 500 companies coming to us now with these new carbon neutral commitments and commitments to really use science based emission targets so we feel that we the time is now to leverage those commitments and further the taxpayer dollar in our climate work will build in our experience by partnering with firms such as Starbucks and in Cargill to improve farmer productivity, and also to mitigate the risks of these investors and connect them to ensure benefits reach local communities. Just one example of how we've done that in the past and how we hope to continue doing that is the Althalia Biodiversity Fund that helped investors and private enterprises to support conservation in the Amazon. We were able to work with the local network of private sector partners and bring a fund that had never been registered in Brazil before and utilize protection through our grant support to then catalyze investment from the private equity role and now we see many other funds going to to look at the Amazon for potential investments in value chains that are compatible with both forest conservation, sustainable agriculture and create local jobs. I'll leave it at that for now but thank you. So it was an excellent presentation, a perfect way to conclude the presentation portion of our briefing today, and we'll transition into some Q&A so thank you very much and also, Sasha, I imagine you're pretty busy right now, about two weeks away or so from the top 26 so thank you very much for taking time out of your very busy day to join us and share some of USAID's perspective on all this, thank you. Let me ask our panelists and Kate to turn on their videos and we'll go right into the Q&A. So I'm going to begin and Kate we'll start with you because you sort of were, we haven't heard from you for a while so we'll start with you and then we'll go through the panel sort of in the order of presentations. I'd like to sort of start with the idea that I kind of alluded to in my intro, the idea of quantity of financing, quality of financing and the $100 billion goal has come up several times today. It tends to be the headline, but in fact, it's not just about how many hundreds of billions of dollars, it's also about sort of how accessible that financing is the quality of it and so Kate I'd love to hear from you and then we'll go to Bella and Rick and so forth. What steps are being taken to ensure that the amount of financing that we're mobilizing for climate change solutions is matched by the quality so that and what steps should we be taking in advance in addition to the ones that we already have to improve the quality of the financing going forward. Great, thank you and it's such an important question because you say it isn't just about kind of numbers and it's very easy to focus on the $100 billion whereas that was a commitment but we know that isn't the totality of what's needed and actually we all know that it's the real intent of this of climate finance in both the narrow sense that we've been talking about a bit today, you know, that public climate finance that we report to the OECD and the UNFCC but also in its much, much broader state as well in terms of all of those flows of finance into the transition to net zero and supporting adaptation and so all of that is hugely important and we need to really think about the impact of that on the ground so in terms of the quantity, yes it's important and sort of tracking that and being able to talk about it, understanding those much wider flows as well that Bella and others have talked about as well but absolutely the quality of what happens is important and certainly we've really focused on that as kind of cop presidency coming in and held a number of sessions with countries to try and understand this and to promote it and to see what we can do and I guess there's a number of particular issues that I might just point towards very briefly so when we think about quality what we've been thinking about is I guess four different things particularly so first of all is is the balance and Joe touched on this between adaptation and mitigation and making sure that we are doing both and adaptation has traditionally not been funded to the extent that adaptation has so we need to make sure that we are doing both across that as well and often we'll talk about finance for things like nature as well and forests which sits within that. The second really important thing is access to that finance it's all very well having the numbers but you need to make sure that it can be accessed and actually spent because that's where you're going to have the impact. And you know Rick and others have talked about you know actually what does that mean in terms of funds like the GCF but also in terms of both a multilateral funding but also the bilateral funding and how can we work with countries to make sure that they can get the kind of funding that they need at the right time and in the right way so access is absolutely critical and one of the really key things that sits behind that is is the right kind of support and technical assistance as well so that companies can really tap into that finance both the public stuff but also those larger flows of private finance to and technical systems is is critical here to get the regulatory environment right. Third point is thinking again about the kind of the kinds of finance and here we talk about things like grants or concessional finance and making sure again that we're targeting those in the right ways to the right kinds of projects and getting that right for different kinds of countries different kinds of projects will need different kinds of inputs as well so there's not a one size fits all in terms of this. And the fourth thing which we look at is the effectiveness and the impacts that you get kind of monitoring that and understanding what we're doing again so we can all learn and get this better over time as well, both whether as kind of donor countries or as recipient if we understand what is effective what countries need, then we can respond to that so hopefully that just gives you a bit of an overview as to how we are thinking about that quality issue. Thanks. Thanks, and Bella. I'd love to hear if you have additional thoughts on that and then we'll go to Rick and then Joe and then Sasha. Sure yeah I mean I think Kate really covered it in a lot of ways in the UK is done really an exceptional job of understanding and assessing value for money they're really well known for it so always good to listen to them on the topic of quality. I think just to underline what she said you know about context specificities so various investment are very context specific they are technology specific they are region specific. They are even locality specific so really making sure you do the analysis to understand what is it that's preventing investment and then being able to say okay these are the tools. These are the instruments, you know where we can really affect changes is critical. Just turning to me here quantity is not the same as impact. And that is one of the issues with the hundred billion and sometimes it ends up being a distraction to the to the problem of the actual problem of climate on the planet. It strikes me watching the presentation Bella did earlier she's showing the percentage of climate flows how much of it was going to mitigation the vast majority, how much of that was going to renewable energy the vast majority of that. Well we all know renewable energy in the last 10 years in terms of the cost of in the price of this is totally collapsed right. So, you see you end up in this kind of question that what's more important the amount of dollars that are going or the amount of clean megawatts that are being put in place. And that is a tension that sometimes exist around the hundred billion. However, at the same time, you know it's politically important to dramatically important to the hundred billion. And it is a sign of progress if more money is flown into projects and opportunities that are real climate and that are resilient. So the key is as I think like the other speakers said is, how do you use it in a way that's most effective particularly talk about public health. And that's going to be four activities that cannot be funded in another way. And then for activities that are addressing some of the barriers to the money that you need to get in that space which is going to be in the private space that's everything from pipeline development to building up local partners that can actually build an ecosystem that we need in those countries access, highly, highly important to question of access. So, you know, that's what governments have improved on I think in the last years and figuring out how best to use those dollars. And sometimes it means it's less dollars better use get better impacts. And, you know, that's not as easy of a story to sell in the context of the hundred billion but it is the reality. Thanks. Yeah, I mean I think the one of the graphs that Bella presented in from the new landscape I think showed, you know obviously there's there's a need for both more and better that we're still way way short globally speaking of the investment levels we need, whether from public or private sources and so figuring out how how you get more of that is going to be key. I totally agree with with what Kate said about about adaptation improving access as well, including access to developing country institutions and that's one of the things that GCF and the adaptation fund do particularly well on is that they directly are developing country ministries, NGOs, businesses, and they can go straight to to those funds without having to go through an international intermediary like a UN agency or a multilateral development bank. The other thing I think the sort of a key topic in terms of quality is about the financial instruments and what we've seen in the last few years is the share of the amount of grant finance has really stagnated. Loans have increased equity finances also not really increased particularly and I'm what what we hear often from from private sectors that they're more interested in equity in guarantees and more innovative financial instruments and then what we hear from from public sector and from from adaptation needs is more grant finance and so figuring out how to how to improve the financial instrument allocation because because a lot of the time the loans aren't necessarily the best suited to the needs. So it's looking at that. And then the other thing is, is, yeah, in terms of effectiveness, how do you catalyze that broader shift. And one of the big challenges has been over the last few years that the, the private finance mobilization hasn't taken off in the 2016 developed countries put forward a roadmap that projected that of the 100 billion 33 billion would be coming from private sources. And as of 2019 it was it was less than 15 billion. So less than half of what what was hoped for. So I think there's more reflection needed on on what needs to happen with public funding to do better at mobilizing private investment because right now it isn't delivering as as was hoped for. So she happy to give you the last word on this. I know we have a minute left. I mean I think this is one of the best questions because at the end of the day, you can't throw money at the problem you have to measure your results and I will say, we were taking that very seriously I was working on lots of different excel sheets to measure, you know, historical performance with our monitoring and evaluation indicators that I referenced. And what we need to do to improve that and track our performance if, and when we have an increased budget and so I think it's really critical that our partners work with us to be able to track our performance in every dollar used and ensure that it is reaching the impact that we hope it should. Thank you for that. We are just about out of time, it says 230, but I will sort of take moderators prerogative and ask the group. Optional, any final words, we're getting close to COP 26 invite anyone to chime in with a key message that you would like to leave our audience with before we wrap up the session. We're going to talk about international climate finance and you can take yourself off mute and speak up if you have something otherwise will will end. I guess I feel duty bound here. In terms of the COP 26 messaging and my final thought would be so our Prime Minister has talked about his goals for COP I mean we've kind of got more formal objectives around mitigation adaptation finance and collaboration so finance is right in there. We've talked about coal, cars, cash and trees. And again you see that finance is right in the middle of what needs, what brings this all together what is going to make it work and we know we need finance for the huge transition that every country and actually every institution needs to go through in order to deliver on the commitments made in Paris. The final thing is that we know that every dollar spent every financial decision needs to take climate into account. And that's countries, companies, communities, institutions. Everything needs to now focus around that for us a lot of that is the hundred billion, but we're also doing a lot of work to with the private finance flows to so we need everyone to come together on this agenda. Thank you. Ella you took yourself off mute. I'm going to interpret that is having something to say so I'll happy to give you the last word today. Oh sure I, I feel like we should leave off with Kate, but I will just say that you know international climate finance really plays a crucial role in so many countries to help finance their climate action we really need to scale it up we need to deploy it more effectively. So thank you to all the tools that we have in our toolbox to do that and so really, and very much encouraged by this panel in this session and thank you so much for all your attention. Well thank you very much. Thank you Kate Bella Rick Joe and Sasha I have been riveted by the last 92 minutes. I've learned a great deal from all of you, and special bonus points Sasha for even bringing up nature based solutions which is something we care a lot about the ESI as well and I just wanted to also just say that across all of your presentations I really really appreciate the amount of emphasis that you all put on adaptation as well as your comments on mitigation something that's critically important and something that. Again, we think a lot about it ESI so thank you very much for that. And again, I know it's a busy time couple weeks before cop 26 so thanks for joining us today. I would also thank those who've made this briefing series possible, our honorary co sponsor the British Embassy Washington and our great partner the Henry M Jackson Foundation thank you to both organizations for your generous support. The briefing series will resume with the negotiations what's on the table this Friday. I hope you'll join us for the full slate of congressional education programming related to cop 26. You can visit www.esi.org RSVP for the entire series. If you've missed something, never worry, everything is archived presentation materials the webcast it's all archived online on our website. So you can catch up or go back and revisit any of the presentations so far. And while you visit us online, you really ought to sign up for our bi weekly newsletter climate change solutions comes out every other Tuesday the next issue comes out this coming Tuesday. So, yeah, this coming Tuesday. And also we have our new daily newsletter, it's going to be exclusively available during cop 26 Glasgow dispatch so please sign up for that as well. I will conclude by thanking everyone on team ESI who made today's briefing possible and the briefing series possible. Thanks to Daniel Brian, I'm really poor Emma Johnson and again, Amber Todd are often Savannah Bertrand. And also to our wonderful interns Isabella Valerie and Roshni for all of the hard work that they do as well for us this fall semester. The screen or the slide you're seeing right now is a survey slide. If you have two minutes and you are willing to take our survey, we value your input and feedback. I know we didn't get a whole lot of questions today so apologies for that but if you have questions, please feel free to send them in. You can also share them in the survey. We read every response and we take it very seriously if you have any comments about the audio quality video quality topics presentations accessibility anything that you'd like to share with us please take a moment to complete our survey. I'm going to go ahead and wrap sorry for going five minutes over but I think it was worth it. Really excellent presentations today. I wish everyone a great rest of your Wednesday. Thank you for joining us and I hope to see you back on Friday.