At COP 29 in Baku, Parties to the Paris Agreement adopted a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on climate finance for developing countries, setting a minimum floor of $300-billion per year by 2035 with developed countries taking the lead, and an aspirational goal of $1.3-trillion annually from all sources.

The decision text dedicated a paragraph to the importance of reforming the multilateral financial architecture and removing the structural barriers and “disenablers” facing developing countries in financing climate action, “including high costs of capital, limited fiscal space, unsustainable debt levels, high transaction costs and conditionalities for accessing climate finance.”

In light of the underwhelming provision and mobilisation of climate finance for developing countries, this report identifies several priorities for systemic reform that can help scale climate finance flows and create a more enabling international financial architecture (IFA) for climate-resilient development.

It responds to Decision 1/CMA.6 for a NCQG adopted at the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP 29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2024, which calls on “all actors to work together to enable the scaling up of financing to developing country Parties for climate action from all public and private sources to at least USD 1.3-trillion per year by 2035.”

Report by the United Nations Conference on Trade & Development