Major opportunities for climate mitigation and adaptation lie in the shift to climate-smart infrastructure, as laid out in the 2018 report Financing Climate Futures – Rethinking Infrastructure, produced by the OECD, UN Environment and the World Bank.
Citizen engagement can be a driving force for raising finance for low carbon, climate-resilient infrastructure development. This report looks at how digital finance technologies, or fintech, can engage citizens as consumers, pension holding investors, co-producers and voters. The impact of fintech in engaging citizens in climate-smart infrastructure development can be observed at four levels: business model innovation, new sources of finance, consumer choice and behaviour and improved systems and data.
This study presents many case examples of innovations that are already changing consumer-citizen behaviour at each level, increasing finance for climate-smart infrastructure and reducing emissions, while also issuing key finding and recommendations to increase the scale and impact of fintech.