Speakers
Valerie Hickey, Global Director for Climate Change, World Bank Group
Debbie Palmer, Director Energy, Climate and Environment Department, UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)
Moderator
Ian Mitchell, Co-Director (Europe) and Senior Policy Fellow, Center for Global Development
Countries have committed to ambitious new climate finance goals—but many are now cutting the aid budgets that underpin them, calling into question how climate and development objectives can realistically be met.
At COP29, countries agreed to mobilise $300 billion a year by 2035 as part of the “New Collective Quantified Goal” on Climate Finance within a wider goal of $1.3 trillion a year which also incorporates international private finance. But since then, we’ve entered a new political reality: the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, and other major providers of finance have signalled their international budgets will need to be reduced.
This event will see CGD experts bring together senior representatives from the World Bank—the world’s largest provider of climate finance—and the UK government, which is trying to remain at the forefront of the international climate agenda while managing severe aid cuts, to explore the difficult choices facing development agencies as they work to meet these goals.
This event has been selected as part of London Climate Action Week (LCAW).
Related Work
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CGD NOTE
MDB Strategies in the Most Climate-Vulnerable Countries
Nancy Lee et al.September 16, 2024 -
Blog Post
Breaking Down Prime Minister Starmer’s Aid Cut
February 26, 2025