A New Framework for Climate Finance: where grants, concessionary loans and the private sector fit in and where they do not
Access the recorded webinar here.
Barbados PM Mia Mottley garnered international headlines with her compelling calls for climate justice at COP26, where she also outlined a vision for new climate finance mechanisms that can break the impasse around global funding for mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage. Drawing on his own decades of experience in the international banking sector, Mottley’s key advisor on climate finance, Avinash Persaud, sheds light on the substance of Barbados’s proposals and the key challenges now in the way of their timely realisation.
Avinash Persaud is special envoy to the Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Amor Mottley, former chairman of the CARICOM Commission on the Economy, and emeritus professor at Gresham College in the UK. His career spreads across finance, academia and public policy, including positions as a former senior executive of J.P. Morgan, UBS, State Street and GAM London Ltd, and former chairman of Elara Capital PLC and RBC Barbados. He is a non-executive director of Proven Investments Limited.
Professor Mizan Khan is Deputy Director of ICCCAD and has been lead climate finance negotiator for Bangladesh since 2001. He will speak to the urgency of new financial mechanisms that can address loss and damage as well as mitigation and adaptation.
Addressing the New Denialism is a research and public engagement project backed by the Open Society Foundations that aims to expose the gap between current investment in climate finance and the projected costs of climate change (and importantly, where and on whom those costs fall).
From the climate investment trap to the trouble with Net Zero, insights from thinkers and policy-makers will shed light on leading efforts to work towards just and balanced futures in the face of ecological breakdown. The series is part of an ongoing GSI programme, to address flaws in the dominant paradigm for climate action and establish new ones built on principles of racial equity and sustainability.