A familiar and troubling story has just played out at the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, in Belém. Global south countries rightly insisted that the ambitious climate action the world needs hinges on much more public finance provided as grants, not loans.
However, we also watched as global north governments continued to champion private capital mobilization and blended finance, and dodge their responsibility to pay up by claiming private finance can and must fill most of the gap. This “private sector-first” approach has prolonged the fossil fuel era, keeping the tools for a just transition to renewable energy out of reach for many countries and communities.
But there is a growing recognition, finally, that this approach is out of touch with economic reality, offering a chance to break out of this pattern. Expert groups of major multilateral summits in the last year called for a much more publicly led and publicly financed approach. Meanwhile, the Financial Times is running headlines like "the magic pony of private finance fails to deliver the green energy transition.”