Coherent climate and sustainable development finance: The role of development assistance in boosting climate action

The Paris Climate Agreement, the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on finance were all adopted in 2015. To date, countries are still struggling to take the necessary action and set themselves on course for the achievement of these agreements. The 2019 Conference of Parties in Madrid has revealed substantial challenges in raising climate ambition and the necessary finance. Transitioning to a low-carbon and climate resilient world and staying below a maximum temperature increase of 1.5oC and even 2oC, require deep transformations across all economic sectors. As the NDC-SDG Connections tool (ndc-sdg.info) indicates, pledged climate activities in countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions touch upon all SDGs. Moreover, climate change itself will have substantial negative implications for development. In that sense, climate and development are strongly interconnected and an efficient use of financial resources would require coherent climate and development finance. By means of the NDC-SDG Connections Tool climate activities data, we identify action areas that countries requested international support for. We place these requests in the context of OECD official (climate-related) development assistance data pre- and post-Paris Agreement to identify coherence, gaps and opportunities for further alignment of climate and development actions. We find that policy coherence of climate and development finance can be substantially improved. Through a closer look at countries stated needs, barriers and gaps and drawing upon literature on climate-development interlinkages, we discuss potential ways forward to make official development assistance more climate proof for both mitigation and adaptation.