Climate Finance
Transparency is critical to understanding where climate finance goes, how it is used, and its impact on climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.
At the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Baku, Parties agreed on the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) for climate finance. This global commitment on the amounts to be provided and mobilised for low- and middle-income countries set a target of $300 billion per year by 2035.
The previous commitment by high-income countries, made in 2009, was to provide $100 billion per year by 2020 (which was later extended to continue until 2025). Figures from the OECD DAC reveal that the target was met two years late, with $115.9 billion provided and mobilised in 2022. However, many stakeholders have raised concerns over the validity and accuracy of what is counted as climate finance. The root of this issue is the lack of a common definition and methodology for counting climate finance, allowing countries and multilateral institutions to decide for themselves what to include and how to count it.
Publish What You Fund believes that transparency is crucial if we want to ensure that climate finance is valid, accountable and, most importantly, effective. We have undertaken the following work to research, analyse and improve the transparency of climate finance:
Climate funds
In early 2025, we examined the transparency of four major multilateral climate funds—the Green Climate Fund, Global Environment Facility, Climate Investment Funds, and Adaptation Fund—which collectively manage nearly $50 billion in pledged funding.
Our report, Better Data for Better Outcomes, highlights that these funds publish good financial and project-level data on their own websites, with examples of leading practice in some areas. However, their reporting practices vary, and three of the four funds are not publishing open data in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard, limiting comparability.
A lack of standardised, accessible, and comparable data can hinder the ability of stakeholders, including governments, researchers, civil society, and climate-vulnerable communities, to coordinate funding, assess effectiveness, and drive learning.
To enhance climate finance transparency and enable stakeholders to build a complete picture of climate, development and humanitarian funding flows, we recommend that climate funds align with international reporting standards, publish granular and accessible data, and improve disclosures on financial transactions, project outcomes, and subnational allocations.
Climate finance and DFIs
Development finance institutions (DFIs) provide significant and growing amounts of climate finance. Climate Policy Initiative estimate that DFIs overall provided 57% of all public climate finance in 2021-2022. In 2024, we investigated the transparency of DFI climate finance and what we know about current DFI climate investments.
We found that multilateral development banks (MDBs) have, in some cases, been harmonising their approaches. But overall we found that most MDBs and bilateral DFIs are not consistently publishing detailed project-level information about their climate investments. Detailed project information is vital for stakeholders to hold DFIs accountable, both for tracking flows and verifying claims, and to understand the investment impacts and identify what is and isn’t effective.
At the very least, DFIs should explain their methodologies and disclose which projects have climate finance, the amounts, and the reasons for counting them as such.
We continue to advocate for DFI climate finance transparency and hold DFIs accountable through our DFI Transparency Index. Assessments for the 2025 edition include new climate finance indicators.
Matching climate finance to needs
In 2022, we initiated research into the transparency of climate finance data, and its role in tracking progress on global commitments and building trust. Our analysis suggested that transparency practices are characterised by a lack of standardisation, unclear definitions and multiple, fragmented information sources. This muddies the picture of who contributes and receives climate finance, how much is given and what it does.
As part of this work, we developed an approach for analysing identified needs at the country level against international donor efforts to provide climate finance, and tested this using data from Kenya. We identified $2.232 billion of total climate financial flows supporting adaptation in Kenya from 2015-2021. This represents 14.82% of the total identified needs in Kenya’s adaptation budget, meaning that funding is 85.18% behind (a shortfall of $12.83 billion).
We would like to broaden and deepen this analysis, carrying out an in-depth review of climate finance (both adaptation and mitigation) in three climate vulnerable countries. By building detailed datasets of climate finance we can help to identify where there are significant gaps or where there is duplication of aid money in other sectors. We believe this work will be of particular interest to governments, civil society and aid donors in these countries who will be able to use the data to see how climate finance aligns with identified needs. Through this work we will identify issues with current reporting approaches and datasets and advocate for improvements in transparency of climate finance, as well as providing a methodology for future similar analyses.
Read our detailed concept note: Climate Finance: Is it Transparent, Impactful and Aligned to National Priorities?
Publish What You Fund is committed to working with providers of climate finance to improve data accessibility and accountability, advocating for best practices from aid transparency to be applied to climate finance. As climate finance scales up, robust transparency mechanisms must be in place to maximize impact and ensure funds reach the most vulnerable communities.