This week, the UNFCCC’s Standing Committee on Finance published a major report detailing the billions of dollars of climate finance flowing across the globe. One of the conclusions of the report is that public support from developed to developing countries constitutes a relatively small component of overall flows.

There is now – probably more than ever before – a shared understanding in the international climate process that tackling climate change will not be possible without a major mobilization, or a redirecting, of private finance. The central question is how scarce public financial means can best be used to unlock investment to curb greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change.

The UN Environment Programme’s Finance Initiative’s ‘Demystifying’ series aims to increase policy-makers’ understanding of private finance. The series includes a sequence of questions that climate negotiators can follow when debating, and ultimately designing, the public interventions required to unlock private climate finance.

Read the Executive Summary of UNEP’s “Demystifying Private Climate Finance” report, the first of a series on the issue.