Dec 11, 2024
Bold moves, deeper collaboration, and a game-changing financial instrument to mobilize climate finance. This is our year in review.
1. Using capital markets to boost clean energy
It is our most ambitious step forward yet. The new CIF Capital Markets Mechanism (CCMM) will mobilize private funds using global financial markets to increase climate finance and deliver clean energy investments. At COP29 in November, we announced a major milestone when CCMM was listed on the London Stock Exchange. The initial bond issuance is planned for early 2025, making us the world’s first multilateral climate fund to use capital markets to raise and increase climate funding.
Find out why United Kingdom Prime Minister Rt Hon Sir Keir Starmer called CIF a key part of the jigsaw of climate finance. See our CCMM Explainer video below:
2. Unprecedented private sector partnerships to decarbonize heavy industry
Our new Industry Decarbonization Program shifted up a gear when it launched its Expressions of Interest for up to $1 Billion in finance for eligible developing countries. The program is unprecedented in another respect: Countries are required to dedicate at least 50 percent of their plan’s resources to the private sector, and partner with one of our six multilateral bank partners to rally all actors for sector-wide transformation. The program aligns with other major global initiatives – including the Industrial Deep Decarbonization Initiative, the Brazil Industry Hub, the Breakthrough Agenda and the Climate Club – and throughout 2024 we have cemented partnerships with key governments, United Nations (UN) agencies, and industry leaders.
Expressions of interest are open until January 17, 2025. Read our ten frequently asked questions here.
“I’m proud that the UK is backing this cutting-edge program that will help attract much-needed investments into developing countries to decarbonize industries. Speeding up the decarbonization of steel, iron, and cement in emerging markets around the world is how we will reduce global emissions and accelerate the clean energy transition.” Minister for Climate Kerry McCarthy, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, United Kingdom
3. $860 million in climate finance
The backbone of our work has always been to provide fast-moving, low-cost, and flexible funding for ambitious country-led investment plans.
This year, we endorsed investment plans to the tune of $860 million in concessional finance to support:
- Kenya in reaching its goal of 100 percent clean generation energy by 2030,
- Launching a coal phase-out in North Macedonia and the Philippines,
- Expanding nature-based solutions in the Dominican Republic and Rwanda,
- Restoring degraded ecosystems and protect carbon sinks in Ethiopia and Zambia, and
- Accelerating one of the most ambitious renewable energy scale-ups in the world in Türkiye.
Even more encouraging is that this is expected to mobilize more than $5 billion in co-financing beyond CIF’s initial financial injection.
4. We welcome our new CEO
We were excited to welcome Tariye Gbadegesin as Chief Executive Officer in March this year. She brings deep experience in the private sector having held leadership positions in infrastructure and climate finance delivery in emerging markets. On joining CIF, she said:
“I am deeply honored to join the Climate Investment Funds to accelerate collective climate action. Developing countries are at the forefront of the climate crisis, and we will only meet this decisive moment by working together to scale climate finance where it is needed most.”
Read CIF CEO Tariye Gbadegesin’s foreword to the CIF 2024 Annual Report here.
5. Our country-led approach in action
To access CIF's catalytic funding, countries lead a multistakeholder approach to formulate and develop their investment plans. This year our new Nature, People, and Climate Program (NPC) partnered with the five riparian countries situated along the Zambezi River Basin to develop a regional investment plan. We did similar workshops in Brazil and Egypt so that governments convene civil society groups, multilateral development banks, the private sector, and others to collectively build a vision for their country or regional investments. Watch Felix Ngamlagosi, Executive Secretary of the Zambezi Watercourse Commission (ZAMCOM) share why bringing together stakeholders, particularly from communities who live along the river basin, has been crucial to developing an investment plan rooted in nature-based solutions.
6. Learning: It's in our DNA
While the Zambezi River Basin, Brazil and Egypt are in the formative phase of investment planning, 2024 also saw us pilot a new “end-of-investment” or “close-out” process to capture results and lessons for investments that have reached completion. CIF’s Monitoring and Results Lead, Sandra Romboli, describes this new process as unique because “it puts people at the center of the results measurement approach itself.” She explains: “Representatives of diverse stakeholder groups in each country are directly involved in monitoring the country’s climate agenda and CIF investment outcomes. This provides a much broader range of perspectives, ground-truthing and enhances transparency.”
Some of the findings from a few of the close outs include Indonesia rebuilding its forest management system to successfully protect some of the planet’s richest ecosystems, six highly-climate vulnerable Caribbean countries developing hazard risk planning for natural disasters, and the Maldives showing the world how a small developing state can achieve energy independence through government learnership and private sector partnerships. We also held recent workshop in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Brazil.
As Cozier Frederick, Dominica’s Minister for the Environment, Rural Modernization, Kalinago Upliftment, and Constituency Empowerment, put it: "Dominica is sort of a petri dish of what small island states are…. This knowledge can be shared. There's a lot we can offer to humanity, to the world.”
As Minister Frederick pointed out, shared knowledge can be a powerful tool in climate action. Tariye Gbadegesin, CIF CEO, has said that “Learning is part of CIF’s founding DNA; it is built into our mandate.”
In line with this mandate, this year we published an independent evaluation of the CIF Forest Investment Program (FIP) portfolio. Drawing on a vast pool of data from 52 CIF-financed projects in 13 countries, the “learning-oriented” evaluation provides evidence of what has worked, for whom and where. The recommendations will inform the remainer of FIP projects as well as provide insights for new CIF programs such as its NPC Program. Watch independent evaluators Jeffrey Hatcher, FIP Evaluation Team Lead (Indufor), and Jessica Kyle, FIP Evaluation Deputy Team Lead (ICF), discuss some the lessons they gathered from communities in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Country knowledge exchanges is also key to sharing experiences with each other, and with CIF. Our flagship regional learning engagement this year brought together 12 countries and 200 participants for the Asia-Pacific Knowledge Exchange in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia. Read our story here and watch a few participants explain why their week together in April was invaluable for learning and sharing.
Throughout the year learning, capacity building, and sharing experiences have been key to delivering on our learning mandate, particularly for developing countries. The Government of Uganda, in partnership CIF and the African Development Bank (AfDB), worked together to develop a national Just Transition Framework and Roadmap. And at a technical workshop in Tunisia, we gained fresh insights from our Renewable Energy Integration (REI) Learning Platform on how Colombia and Kenya are "leading and learning" on integrating renewable energy sources into their national power grids.
Why are country exchanges vital to what we do? This is how Colombia’s Vice Minister of Energy, Javier Campillo, sees the benefit of CIF’s country engagements as spaces for capacity building, exchange, and learning from peers.
Thank you to our partners and stakeholders from across the climate spectrum for making 2024 the year of new innovations through CCMM and a fresh strategic outlook with our new CEO. As CCMM progresses next year, it promises to advance our evolution as a leading multilateral climate fund, as well as reverberate through the wider climate finance landscape. Here's looking foward to 2025!
