From Credits to Capital: Financing the Net Zero Transition

🌐 ​Language: English ♿ ​Wheel-chair accessible 🎟️ ​Hosted by: The Net Zero Lab Meeting global climate goals will require a significant increase in the amount of finance flowing towards activities that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Yet the landscape of mechanisms available to finance mitigation is increasingly complex. From carbon credits and results-based payments to concessional and blended finance, green bonds and emerging impact bonds, different instruments seek to mobilise capital for climate action in fundamentally different ways. Understanding these differences is increasingly important. Carbon finance typically links payments to quantified emissions reductions or removals, including through carbon credits, while the broader field of climate finance encompasses a much wider range of public and private financial flows supporting the transition. Each approach presents different opportunities, risks and questions around environmental integrity, financial additionality, scalability and accountability. This public session hosted by the Max Planck Institute’s Net Zero Lab will provide an accessible introduction to this rapidly evolving landscape. Beginning with a Carbon Finance vs Climate Finance 101, it will then bring together experts for two panels. The first will examine the opportunities and pitfalls of using carbon credits to finance mitigation. The second will look beyond carbon markets to explore the wider climate-finance toolbox, including blended finance, results-based approaches and climate and impact bonds. Goal: to provide participants with a practical understanding of how different financial mechanisms can channel capital towards climate mitigation, where each works best, and how they might complement one another in financing the transition to net zero.