Organized by Climate Policy Initiative and the World Bank Group in collaboration with China Light & Power and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the first meeting of the San Giorgio Group took place over one and a half days on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice.

The objective of this inaugural meeting was to establish a new, select working group of key financial intermediaries and institutions actively engaged in green, low-emissions finance, limited to about 50 members.  Drawing on the experience of its members and using detailed analysis of investment portfolios and projects, the San Giorgio Group will explore ways to align public and private incentives, manage risks and coordinate different actors, to scale up and most effectively deploy funding.

The Group’s first meeting started with an overview of the current landscape of climate finance, including the different pathways, processes, portfolio decisions, and issues in play. A series of case study sessions then allowed the Group to explore the life cycle of existing green investment projects, paying attention to both process and design. The case studies focused on significant portfolios and projects involving all forms of 1) equity or debt investment, 2) investment guarantees or insurance products, 3) other diversification strategies, options, and derivatives related to project risk management or portfolio risk distribution. The diversity of studies enabled participants to address a range of issues involved in putting together successful green, low-emissions investment projects, including governance challenges, the role of national development and climate policies, innovations in investment models, and the potential to alter the trajectories of global and national emissions trends.

Overall, the meeting demonstrated that green, low-emissions finance is indeed emerging as an active practice that engages a variety of actors. As with all financing of innovative activities, the private sector will provide the bulk of the infrastructure investments essential to the transformation of the energy and land use systems that drive climate risks. Public and multilateral sources, however, are a vital complement to these private flows and, given their scarcity, need to be used skillfully to ensure maximum impact, often in combination with private flows and policy reforms led by host governments. The San Giorgio Group’s emphasis will therefore be on learning lessons from the evolving practice in the field of low-emissions finance, with a focus on the following questions:

• What is the role of public money? What is the most effective balance between public and private capital?
• How to deliver public money best?
• How to ensure alignment of international and national public investment flows with each other and with private investments?
• How to ensure learning?

The San Giorgio Group will continue to meet regularly to explore these questions based on the tracking of concrete case studies. Recently, during our joint official side event at the UNFCCC COP 17 in Durban, the San Giorgio Group had the opportunity to continue the lively debate which was started in Venice and to discuss the early results from the first set of SGG case studies.

For further information on the San Giorgio Group, please contact info@cpivenice.org.

Agenda and Presentations

Welcome

• Thomas Heller, Executive Director, Climate Policy Initiative
• Andrew Steer, Special Envoy for Climate Change, World Bank
• Trevor Manuel, Minister in the Presidency of the Government of the Republic of South Africa: National Planning (VC)