This Urban Adaptation Finance Tracking brief identifies gaps and barriers to financing resilience solutions in global urban areas and highlights entry points to drive action by investors, cities, national governments, and other stakeholders to increase urban adaptation finance.
This publication is intended for businesses, especially Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). It aims to demonstrate the compelling business case for eco-innovation and how it can enable companies to carve out commercially interesting opportunities.
In this paper, the identification of gaps in climate finance is based on a comprehensive review not only of current climate finance projects, but also of the contributions of SMEs to climate action, drawing on nearly twenty years of experience in providing incubation and acceleration programmes for eco-inclusive enterprises within SEED programmes as well as insights and good practices from the interrelated spheres of SME finance and green finance. This paper provides climate finance practitioners and policymakers as well as local financial institutions and other SME intermediaries (such as incubators, accelerators, business development service (BDS) providers) with tangible recommendations to better understand and leverage the potential of SMEs in meeting climate action objectives from the ground up.
The year 2020 is a year unlike any other, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to severely hit countries, resulting in more than 70 million infected people globally, a million deaths, millions of unemployed people, and trillions of dollars pulled-out for emergency stimulus packages to rescue the economies. The full impact of the pandemic is still expanding and governments are under immense pressure not only to invest in COVID-19 recovery packages while facing budget shortfalls, rising debt, and declining tax revenues, but also to “green” these investments.
The report communicates how climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution can be tackled jointly within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. It serves to translate the current state of scientific knowledge into crisp, clear, and digestible facts-based messages that the world can relate to and follow up on.