Just Energy Transition Partnerships and other ways to shift climate finance toward low-income countries

At ImpactAlpha, Jonathan Phillips, director of the James E. Rogers Energy Access Project, writes:

"Important progress is underway on climate finance to developing countries, although you may have missed it in COP27 read-outs. The legacy of the Egypt gathering will be the creation of a Loss and Damage (L&D) Fund that, theoretically, will help poor countries recover from increasingly frequent and devastating climate-related events.

"At the moment, the L&D Fund is merely a freshly opened, depressingly empty bank account. No decisions were made in Egypt regarding how much money will go in the bank account, who will deposit it, when it will be deposited, who can withdraw it, or for what purpose.

"Yet developments mostly outside the COP27 negotiating text across three other critical fronts hold potential for shifting the underlying dynamics holding back low-carbon investment in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs): carbon markets, Just Energy Transition Partnerships, and reform of the development finance institutional architecture."