FINANCIAL INNOVATION LAB

Leveraged co-financing from public and private sources has emerged as a policy priority among international environment and development agencies.

The Financial Innovation LAB is a place to exchange ideas about financing techniques for climate change mitigation and adaptation investments.

Our main objective is to create investment vehicles and financial structures that maximize private sector leverage and optimize the use of donor’s funds, such as the (Clean Technology Fund, Global Environmental Facility, Green Climate Fund and more).

Why climate change investments are perceived as being riskier? Most important reasons: high up-front costs, new technologies, uncertain market demand, long term-horizon of investments, policy bias favoring incumbents.

Our key premise is that public money should not be used for direct investing, but for de-risking. That is, donor’s resources should be carefully applied to absorb certain risks that constrain private sector involvement in green financing.

For this purpose, we combine a variety of financial tools, such as guarantees, blended loans, first loss structures, insurance vehicles, etc.

Juan A. Ketterer