VENICE, ITALY — Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), a global research organization focused on the effectiveness of energy and climate policy and programs, today announced the establishment of the CPI Climate Finance Project, based in Venice.  The project’s goal is to provide research on climate finance to policymakers and the private sector to help them make the best decisions in support of low-carbon growth.

Specifically, the project will:

• establish a platform for comprehensive tracking of international climate finance;
• analyze the effectiveness of climate finance; and
• develop a methodology/evaluation framework to assess the productivity of climate finance.

“Policymakers understand that adequate and effective finance is necessary for low-carbon growth,” said Barbara Buchner, CPI Venice director and project chair, “but they want to better understand the current mix of finance, what works and what doesn’t, and how to maximize productivity and transparency of financial flows. The CPI Climate Finance Project will engage the private and public sectors in addressing these questions.”

To launch the project, CPI today co-hosted a workshop in Venice with the International Center of Climate Governance (ICCG), in collaboration with the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC). Participants included experts in climate finance from the public and private sectors as well as NGOs and academia. The workshop focused on 1) defining methods to calculate finance flows, 2) ways to evaluate the effectiveness of cross-national finance flows, and 3) how to reduce the risk of investing in climate finance. CPI will publish a summary of the workshop in November.

***

Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) is a policy effectiveness analysis and advisory organization.  Its mission is to assess, diagnose, and support nations’ efforts to achieve low-carbon growth.  An independent, not-for-profit organization with long-term support from George Soros, CPI’s headquarters are in San Francisco and regional offices are in Berlin, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.