Conference Agenda

This study examines whether climate finance allocations align with development needs and just benchmarks, as well as what observed patterns imply for climate finance governance. Using 2023 data from the Climate Policy Initiative’s Global Landscape of Climate Finance, we analyse the regional distribution of flows across mitigation, adaptation, instruments, and institutional channels. We combine (i) descriptive decompositions and inequality metrics for geographic concentration with (ii) a justice-adjusted intensity measure that normalises regional finance by GDP (PPP) as a proxy for economic capacity, and (iii) flow-level regressions that condition on destination region and sector to identify correlates of finance volumes across uses, instruments, and actors. Results show a strongly mitigation-dominated portfolio and substantial concentration of finance in a small number of destination regions. The capacity-normalised benchmark indicates only weak alignment between finance intensity and constrained economic capacity. Regression evidence suggests that—depending on geography and sector—adaptation-labelled flows and grant-based instruments are associated with smaller flow magnitudes relative to mitigation and market-rate debt baselines, which is consistent with intermediation incentives prioritising scale, risk management, and bankable pipelines. We argue that accounting boundaries (global totals versus internationally oriented support) are central to interpreting “progress” in climate finance and to burden-sharing debates. Our findings are intended to inform ongoing discussions on the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) that was agreed at the Baku climate conference in 2024 (COP29), on transparency and comparability of climate finance accounting, and on reforms to multilateral development bank mandates and incentive structures to better align scale with equity and resilience objectives.