Mobilising international climate finance: lessons from the fast-start finance period

This report reviews the contributions of 37 countries, including Germany, Japan, Norway, the UK and the US, to the ‘Fast-Start Finance’ (FSF), the first step to providing climate finance at a scale that matched the urgency of the situation, over the course of the 2010-2012 timeframe. It asserts that climate finance could better target country needs, circumstances and vulnerabilities. It recognises the need to scale up finance for programmes that support adaptation and strengthen resilience to the impacts of climate change, which received a limited share of FSF, and suggests an opportunity to spend adaptation finance in ways that better target vulnerable countries.

The overall report finds that although countries have reported exceeding initial FSF commitments, definitional and operational biases paint a more complex picture. It calls for climate risk to be integrated into all development finance, and argues that responding to climate change requires shifting overarching global investment in key sectors away from business-as-usual approaches towards climate-compatible options, avoiding lock-in to high-carbon technologies.