Dude, where’s my climate finance platform?

Happy Earth Day! Many of the blogs and communications today will rightly be calling for a huge investment into climate finance, with proponents arguing for a scaling up of spending from billions of dollars to trillions. 

What impact is that spending having? What’s working and what could we do better? These are important questions, not only because the sums needed are huge but also if we can’t demonstrate their impact, citizens will be less motivated to fight for that spending at a time of rising cost of living and myriad other challenges, making these funds an easy target for cash-strapped governments to cut or deprioritize

So if we want to raise more money for climate adaptation and mitigation, we need to change the narrative and prove the vast sums already committed really do make an impact and benefit communities. 

That’s where climate finance tracking platforms come in. These are designed as accessible one- stop shops where national and international contributions invested in climate adaptation, mitigation and resilience are tracked and delivered. Although there have been some ambitious commitments made to country platforms and partnership around climate finance, including under the G20 Reference Framework for Effective Country Platforms for Climate Finance and under Just Energy Transition Partnerships, there are surprisingly few good examples. 

There is often no obvious way for citizens to understand what climate funds are being invested in their communities, if any, or how to have a say on these funds or follow their impact. A 2021 review by WRI found that few governments are tagging or tracking climate-related budget expenditures effectively. Meanwhile, the ONE Campaign’s Climate Finance Files suggest that two thirds of pledged climate funds are not reported as disbursed or they do not go to projects that had much to do with climate. The World Bank notes that less than 17% of global climate finance supports local resilience efforts, and Indigenous communities receive only around 5% of environmental protection funding. 

The good news is, we can change this demoralizing narrative: we already have models of transparent, trackable systems being used for other public spending that we can build on to address this gap in information, insight and storytelling! 

We are going to share two with you that we think fit the bill. We will explain what we can learn from them and why we like them. We would love to hear about others!

First up, we have Ukraine’s Digital Restoration Ecosystem for Accountable Management (DREAM). 

DREAM is a great example of a full transactional digital workflow for planning and delivering infrastructure projects, connecting across donors, government and communities. It started as a project to report transparently on the finance flows around Ukraine’s reconstruction but has since developed into a Public Investment Management System for the country, coordinating across ministries, donors and communities. 

DREAM now covers more than 11,000 projects, worth over US$24 billion, of which about 22% are partially funded. Each project is covered by a public profile and with financial information, project documentation and risk analytics to improve investment transparency and accountability (see this video on the reconstruction of Ruta Kindergarten for inspiration). Over 1,300 managing organizations across the country are now using DREAM.

Importantly DREAM gives local communities a voice and agency to propose and prioritize projects and to match them to available national and international funding windows. DREAM both allows donors to follow the money to build trust and allows communities to propose projects most valuable to them and to help them get support to deliver them: a two-way interaction that we think will be vital for any country’s climate finance platform. 

This has been used successfully by the European Investment Bank and UNICEF to run selections on vital investments like School Shelters, quickly and easily in one month as opposed to the planned six. DREAM’s data is fully open and shared across Ukraine’s civil society ecosystem.

One day, every country should have a system like DREAM (quick advertorial: OCP runs the DREAM office and our team is available to share lessons, code and advice). Even if you don’t yet have the impressive digital infrastructure of Ukraine, you still have options.  

Enter our second example of good practice: the Inter-American Development Bank’s MapaInversiones.

MapaInversiones is a regional initiative aiming at creating online tools to visualize public investment data. Developed by the IDB to map public investment projects in Latin America, it draws together user-friendly project finance information to share across different user communities. It provides insight into the funding sources and status of the projects as well as connecting to information on procurement, spending and environmental indicators and in some countries, matching investments to SDG objectives. it’s already been shown to have a positive impact on project planning and delivery. 

MapaInversiones platforms have been implemented in multiple countries, including Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Peru, República Dominicana. The data structures and approaches that underpin the platforms are detailed more here. 

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. It’s equally important to recognize you can’t promote or grow an initiative without success stories and “customer” testimonials. 

Public spending and investment platforms like Ukraine’s DREAM platform for reconstruction spending and the Inter-American Development Bank’s MapaInversiones show us that there is a better way, and that it is entirely possible to track climate spending – an indispensable first step in validating and sharing impact stories of how these funds are making a difference in the fight to protect our planet. 

With better data and information on how climate funds are spent, we will be able to include communities in the procurement and spending decisions that affect them, and communicate back to citizens how this money made a real difference.

The more public stakeholders see, feel and believe in the value delivered by climate funding, the more they will support investing in it. Let’s step up to meet that challenge this Earth Day.  

Image: Generated using ChatGPT.