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This is the third in a series of five blogs on the Biden administration’s global development agenda. This blog focuses on the Biden administration’s record on pillar 3: Decarbonize the Economy and Increase Climate Resilience, and offers an assessment of how the next Trump administration could affect...

Climate finance is a disaster. COP29 ended with a hotly-contested and almost universally-loathed agreement for rich countries to provide $300 billion each year to developing countries, to defray the costs of adapting to and mitigating the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Commentators from th...

Last week, the UN Foundation and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs kindly asked me to talk at an informal session on the coherence between development and climate finance. I learned a lot, and it helped me understand a little better the various positions on the issue, but I (still) ca...

It almost didn’t happen, but at the eleventh hour, negotiators at COP29 in Baku were able to finalise an agreement that wealthy countries would provide at least $300 billion annually to developing countries by 2035. On the face of it, a tripling of the previous $100 billion goal sounds impressive. A...

There is a broad consensus that achieving the SDGs and addressing the costs of climate change in developing countries will require substantial financial resources. In this blog post, we argue that while mobilizing additional financing is challenging, effectively absorbing and utilizing these additio...

This year’s COP climate conference is up and staggering in in Baku, Azerbaijan. A bigger climate finance promise won’t help unless it is wrapped around with commitments to existing development finance. And, under business as usual, it will make things positively worse.

As world leaders gather at COP29 to chart a path forward on financing efforts to address the global climate crisis, one critical issue demands their attention: the chronic underfunding of climate adaptation in low-income, low-emission countries.

Negotiations on a new climate finance goal are stuck. There has been little progress on the two biggest issues: how big should the goal be, and who should pay. This matters. COP29—the last before countries commit to new targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in updated Nationally Determined Co...

After taking office amid COVID-19 and increasingly urgent alarms about the threat of climate change, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen started  making the case for MDB reform underscoring that these institutions, while vital, were no longer fit for purpose. Her priority was to support the evolution of...