ANTALYA (The Thursday Times) — The development finance institutions of Britain, Norway, and Canada have launched a joint initiative to deliver $10 billion in climate finance to emerging markets by 2030, unveiling it this week at the COP31 climate summit in Antalya.
British International Investment (BII), Norfund, and FinDev Canada said the money, which includes private capital they expect to draw in alongside their own, will go to renewable energy, power transmission and distribution, energy storage, sustainable fuels, and cutting emissions from industry.
Under a memorandum of understanding, the three will share investment pipelines and market intelligence, coordinate due diligence, co-invest in flagship deals, and work on common ways of measuring climate and development effects. They said the aim was to cut duplicated work and speed up decisions on deals they back together. The partnership is called 10by30.
“The world is running out of time and must speed up the global energy transition to limit the climate crisis,” said Åsmund Aukrust, Norway’s minister of international development. He called the collaboration “a concrete contribution to making this year’s climate summit about how we deliver in order to succeed”.
Leslie Maasdorp, BII’s chief executive, said the goal was to “move private capital at an unprecedented scale to where it is needed the most”. Norfund’s chief executive, Erik Sandersen, said climate finance needed “both scale and speed”, while FinDev Canada’s chief executive, Lori Kerr, said the focus would be on higher-emitting emerging markets.
The wider finance gap
At COP29 in Baku in 2024, countries agreed to mobilise at least $300 billion a year for developing countries by 2035, and called for climate finance from all sources to reach $1.3 trillion a year. The COP31 presidency has described this year’s summit as “a COP of implementation and acceleration”.
Each institution already runs its own climate vehicle: the Norwegian Climate Investment Fund, British Climate Partners, and FinDev Canada’s Climate Mobilization Strategy, under which the Canadian lender has committed to support $9.5 billion in climate finance by 2031.
The three did not say which countries the money would reach. Pakistan has told the summit it needs about $138 billion for clean power by 2035, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called for grant-based finance for the countries hit hardest by climate disasters. Earlier in the week, philanthropic groups pledged more than $480 million to cut methane and other fast-acting pollutants.
