One of the most significant barriers to city administrations developing innovative climate change infrastructure projects is access to finance.
Rising sea levels, droughts, floods, and storms – climate change has a massive impact on cities. Yet cities themselves are responsible for 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions - so both increasing resilience and reducing emissions in cities are crucial in tackling the climate crisis. But one of the most significant barriers to city administrations developing innovative climate change infrastructure projects is access to finance. Financial institutions are often cautious to invest in transformative and ground-breaking projects unless they see robust preparation and sound business cases in place. As a result, projects can fall at the first hurdle, with city administrations unable to secure funding to pursue a greener and healthier vision.
The C40 Cities Finance Facility (CFF) serves as a link between cities and finance to support a green and just transition.
The CFF is a UNFCCC award-winning project preparation facility that focuses on three components: preparing climate relevant infrastructure projects for financial readiness, linking projects to finance, and replicating and upscaling projects, proven approaches, and instruments. The CFF focuses on the sectors of mobility, renewable energy, waste management, and nature-based solutions, providing benefits including employment opportunities, improving citizens’ health, and social equity.
The administrations of CFF’s partner cities are in the lead at all stages of the project development and are responsible for all decisions. The CFF support empowers city administrations to prepare finance ready infrastructure projects and to access the most suitable financing solutions, amongst others through preparing necessary technical, legal, and commercial studies, city-led learning and training events, on the job-training, peer-to-peer exchanges, the establishment of inter-departmental decision-making structures and mainstreaming equity and inclusion in all stages of the project development. The CFF is forecasted to reduce over 2.5 million tons of GHG emissions in 30 cities worldwide, increase 2 million people’s resilience towards climate change, and leverage an investment volume of USD 1 billion of climate finance by 2025.