Driving finance today for the climate resilient society of tomorrow

UNEP FI partnered with Climate Finance Advisors to deliver this report to the Global Commission on Adaptation. The report identifies the main barriers in the financial system to accelerated investment in adaptation-related programmes and projects and proposes six sets of recommendations to unlock the financing of adaptation programmes. While the challenges and potential solutions are wide ranging, key needs fall into several categories:

• Climate risk management and climate risk disclosure
• Harmonization of practices and terminology
• (re) Allocation of capital towards climate resilience, adaptation and overall sustainability

​Many efforts to bring about the changes in the financial system that are needed to integrate climate risks in decision making have been initiated, but the reality today is that the necessary rules, regulations, standards, and best practices remain nascent and weakly defined. While specific to different segments and actors within the financial system, five broad categories of barriers to scaling up financing for adaptation and resilience summarize the challenge:

• Inadequate support and/or incentives to act
• Weak policies and conventions in the financial industry
• Market barriers
• Operational gaps at the institution level
• Low technical capacity for climate risk management