London Climate Action Week 2024: Financing Global Climate Transitions

Nick Mabey, Co-CEO and Founder, E3G, explores each of the #LCAW2024 themes in a series of posts highlighting the climate action context and related events from across the week. London Climate Action Week takes place 22-30 June 2024.

This year is a critical for achieving progress on global climate finance, with a new finance goal being negotiated at COP 29 in Baku and reforms to global regulation and multilateral banks being a top priority of the Brazilian G20. LCAW will see vibrant discussion of the high-level diplomacy, contentious geopolitics and technical practicalities of how to reshape the global finance system, including closing the gaps in delivering past climate finance promises.

Even though clean finance is growing at over 20% a year this is not enough to deliver the investment needed to meet the Paris goals. Investment is also overwhelmingly concentrated in major economies, with poorer and smaller countries unable to compete to attract affordable funding. Even where investment is flowing there are major gaps in supporting sectors like buildings efficiency, cities, new businesses, agriculture, social transitions, nature and resilience.

A major challenge is to ensure that the work done to integrate climate issues into financial decision making over the last decade actually leads to more, cleaner and fairer finance flowing. ?Only if there is confidence in the availability of affordable finance will countries, cities and companies support ambitious emission reduction targets in 2025.

London remains one of the world’s leading financial centres, but global competition is fierce especially for green and sustainable finance. LCAW 2024 will see over 100 events addressing all aspects of climate financing including what London needs to do to keep ahead.

These include major events like the Climate Investment Summit, Climate Innovation Forum, Green Finance Institute Series, Bloomberg Sustainable Finance Forum and Reset Connect plus convenings of pension funds, banking and institutional investors. Many events will focus on investment in emerging markets in energy and resilience sectors.

Critical evaluation of current finance system reforms will be carried by independent analysts at events on sustainability bonds, supply chain decarbonisation and due diligence. Campaigners will also discuss how to hold finance actors to their climate commitments.

LCAW will see London’s world leading insurance sector hold the first De-risking Summit. This will launch a process for aligning the global insurance industry to deliver the innovations help derisk transition finance and provide sustainable protection to the most vulnerable in developing countries. This work benefits from strong synergies with London’s vibrant network of academic, public and non-profit organisations working globally on climate risk assessment, resilience and inclusive adaptation.

LCAW 2024 will also see London demonstrate its role as a major global hub of clean tech innovation, start-ups and venture finance. There is a wide range of impact investor, venture capital and start-up support events from the Reset-Connect’s Pitch and Invest event, the Blue Earth Forum, sustainable fashion start-ups and the Undaunted Innovation Hub including a focus on improving women’s representation in cleantech investing and energy transitions. LCAW will see new ventures from around the world coming to London?to engage with investors including agritech businesses from Brazil, global urban ventures and the Earthshot Prize winners.

Following the launch of the pathbreaking Transition Plan Taskforce guidance last year the issues of implementing and mobilising transition finance will be central to LCAW 2024. This will include the launch of a major new transition tracking tool and events looking at standards, sectoral implementation and indicators of transition.

London has the world’s richest ecosystem of organisations focused on financing the global climate transition. We hope LCAW 2024 can make a real difference in delivering the financial foundations of ambition at COP 29 and into the 'ambition year' of 2025.