Welcome to E Co’s new White paper – Bridging the investability gap: Mobilising private capital for a resilient future
The global climate finance gap is measured in the trillions. While trillions in private capital exist, it remains largely out of reach for high-impact adaptation and resilience projects. The central challenge is not a lack of capital, but a persistent gap in investability.
Authored by Clare Wingfield, Elena Rempp, and E Co’s private sector practice team, this report provides a comprehensive diagnosis of the structural barriers and an actionable framework for both public and private actors to build a robust and investable market for climate finance.
Key insights from the report
The paper argues that to solve the climate finance challenge, we must reframe sustainability as investability. It showcases how this is already happening by providing practical pathways and proven models:
- Leveraging blended finance: We demonstrate the strategic use of public capital to absorb first-loss risk and de-risk investments. Our work secured USD189 million in concessional finance for the &Green Fund, showcasing how this model is critical for crowding in commercial capital.
- Embracing new asset classes: The report identifies nature and adaptation as nascent, high-potential asset classes. We explore new revenue streams like Biodiversity credits and Performance-Linked Financial Instruments, which can offer attractive, long-term returns.
- The public sector’s role as market-maker: We outline recommendations for governments and Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) to use their data (e.g., from the GEMS database) to correct the private sector’s perception gap on emerging market risk and empower National Development Banks (NDBs) as anchors for local implementation.
By moving beyond high-level commitments to the granular details of financial structuring, this paper provides critical insights into how we can collectively accelerate private finance deployment at the scale and speed required.