About

The impact of climate change on people’s lives and livelihoods is increasingly hard to ignore, and is moreover characterized by trenchant inequities: rich countries generate the vast majority of global CO2 emissions, but poor nations overwhelmingly suffer the consequences. In response, wealthy nations have pledged to mobilize hundreds of billions of Euros in “climate finance” to help their more vulnerable counterparts. The past decade has seen climate finance nearly double, but we know very little about what happens when these resources reach their intended beneficiaries in the Global South. ClimateFiGS seeks to address this gap, generating knowledge on where and how climate finance can have the greatest impact, and what constitute the greatest areas of unmet need.

A Global South Perspective

ClimateFiGS examines the extent to which funds provided through traditional and new channels align with recipient country priorities, as well as what drives variation in alignment. ClimateFiGS also considers how leaders’ characteristics, including their gender and age, condition their responses, as well as the relative emphasis they place on mitigation (i.e., risk protection) vs. adaptation (i.e., risk management). This approach recognizes the agency of Global South leaders, and expands the knowledge frontier on substantive representation, distributive politics, and environmental policymaking.

ClimateFiGS aims to break empirical ground with empirical analysis on the mobilization and alignment of climate finance, as well as by studying detailed patterns of budget allocation and expenditure in three African countries. The project further adapts methods from social activism to map the power dynamics that drive climate finance decision-making within countries, and traces the processes that lead certain sectors and districts to be prioritized. ClimateFiGS is thus poised to generate knowledge to address one of the world’s most “wicked” problems: How can we avert the most devastating impacts of climate change for the world’s most vulnerable?

Our PROGRESS SO FAR 

Since launching in April 2024, ClimateFiGS has assembled an internationally diverse research team, hosted co-design workshops in Tanzania and South Africa, and is developing a growing body of research outputs including peer-reviewed papers, policy briefs, and open datasets. Early findings are already challenging assumptions about how climate finance flows, who shapes those flows, and who benefits.