Despite a flurry of good news stories on clean energy development, global climate finance still falls far short of the $1 trillion per year that will be needed through 2050 to avert runaway climate change, the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) reported last week.
Though 1.4% of global GDP would have been enough to hit the $1 trillion target, public and private investment in climate solutions totalled only $331 billion in 2013, InsideClimate News reports. That figure represented a drop of almost 8% compared to 2012, though most of the loss reflected the falling cost of solar technology.
- Concise headlines. Original content. Timely news and views from a select group of opinion leaders. Special extras.
- Everything you need, nothing you don’t.
- The Weekender: The climate news you need.
“Solar power installations jumped by nearly a third in 2013, to 40 gigawatts,” Douglass writes. “But investors spent $40 billion less on those projects than they would have at 2012 prices, according to CPI.”
Even so, overall investment is falling behind the pace that is needed to confront the climate challenge. To close the funding gap, “we do need significant scaling up of the private sector, because that is obviously where most of the capital is,” said CPI Senior Director Barbara Buchner. “It’s not that there is a lack of capital, but we really need to target it well and take off the risk that private sector isn’t able to [accept].”
