Tiza Mafira, CPI Indonesia’s Senior Analyst, participated in the Conference on Asia-Europe SDGs and Financing in Hanoi, Vietnam, on the 6th-7th of September 2017. She was one of the panelists at the session on “Climate Finance on a National Level,” together with: Melissa Low from Energy Studies Institute Singapore, Dr. Pham Hoang Mai Director General at Ministry of Planning and Investment Viet Nam, Jacqueline Kacprzak from Ministry of Economic Development Poland, and Dr. Bernhard Seliger from the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
Tiza presented the current trends in climate financing, among others that there has been more domestic spending than international funding, and the latter could catalyze the former; there will be more private domestic spending than public domestic spending, and the latter could catalyze the former; and we are still far off the amount needed to meet SDG goals, including SDG #13 on Climate Action. In Indonesia, nearly 70% of public climate finance came from the state budget. Most of it was spent on indirect activities, and there is potential for more effective spending if used to catalyze private investment.
Some of the key recommendations for policymakers is to:
- Take actions that help private actors reduce their exposure to risks and improve their access to financing, such as providing state-backed guarantees;
- Increase access to concessional finance to help investors reduce project costs and support the expansion of large projects; and, lastly,
- Support opportunities to demonstrate the effectiveness of new methods and approaches by, for example, channeling public resources through private or quasi-private entities.
