Follow the money: Country platforms and export credit agencies bring in climate finance

Welcome to Top of the COP, a daily recap of the top headlines coming from the Global Climate Action Agenda.

In this edition: It’s Finance and Trade Day at COP31. Country platforms are unlocking billions in climate finance; FX-EDGE is derisking investment; carbon markets are aligning global standards; and export credit agencies with combined portfolios of USD 376 billion commit to net zero.

Getting the finance flowing

Every COP comes back to money.

And while Top of the COP focuses on the brightest solutions coming from the Action Agenda, we’d be remiss to ignore the scale of the challenge.

At COP29, countries agreed to scale up climate finance to developing countries, with developed countries leading the effort: at least USD 300 billion a year by 2035, within a wider goal of USD 1.3 trillion a year from all public and private sources. The Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T, launched at COP30, sets out how to get there.

Global climate finance passed USD 2 trillion for the first time in 2024, but least developed countries received just USD 36 billion, a fall of 21% as aid budgets came under strain. Closing that gap is what the Roadmap is for.

Positively, domestic private investment in developing countries is growing, and climate solutions investments from the UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance reached USD 787 billion in 2025, up 41% from 2023. Even so, overall finance remains far short of the challenge.

On Finance and Trade Day at COP31, the focus is on what countries can do now: getting more of the money already available to where it needs to go. That means not just turning on the tap, but connecting the many streams of finance – from governments and development banks to commercial lenders and private investors – and ensuring they flow in the same direction, particularly to developing countries.

Can country platforms unlock billions in climate investment?

Climate finance often gets stuck between ambition and execution. Governments have investment priorities, development banks have capital, and private investors have money to deploy. But getting them behind the same projects, on the same terms, is another matter.

Enter the Country Platforms Hub, which leads an Action Agenda plan to accelerate climate and nature finance. Some 20 countries are working with the Hub to identify priority sectors – such as clean energy or water – and build coordinated investment pipelines around them. At COP31, Türkiye is launching the TIDIP investment platform, with plans to mobilize over USD 6 billion to decarbonize steel, cement, aluminium, and fertilizers.

Yesterday, in Antalya, Brazil showed what its platform, BIP, can deliver. The Brazilian government announced BRL 39 billion (USD 7.1 billion) mobilized for energy transition and climate projects in Brazil.

These platforms build on solid investment progress to date. For example, South Africa has secured USD 14.38 billion in pledged commitments for the Just Energy Transition Partnership, with USD 7.72 billion already allocated for energy grid upgrades, green hydrogen, and more.

Channelling investment is harder than it sounds, mostly because of the myriad departments, ministries, and stakeholders involved – but if there’s a clear platform to rally behind, things get easier. And it’s all about connections here. The platforms feed the COP31 Presidency’s Climate Implementation Bridge, which aims to support investable project pipelines in developing countries. It already counts pilots in Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Fiji, with five more countries expected to be announced at COP31.

FX-EDGE makes climate investment a lot less risky

Countries are also exploring other tools for mobilizing private capital at scale. Last year, under the Action Agenda, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) launched FX-EDGE, designed to help countries attract private investment by addressing currency risk, liquidity constraints, and other financing barriers.

Take a pension fund in London, which thinks in pounds. If it puts GBP 100 million into a large-scale agroforestry project in the Amazon and the Brazilian real loses value against the pound over the next ten years, it loses money even if the project succeeds. So foreign investors either say no, or they demand much higher returns to compensate for the risk. Either way, green projects in other countries become too expensive to finance. FX-EDGE intends to fix that.

The platform was inspired by Brazil’s Eco Invest programme and supports countries to unlock private investment and attract foreign capital for sustainable development.

So far, Eco Invest has mobilized more than USD 36 billion in investments through five auctions and launched 75 projects, with implementation underway on the ground. These include biorefineries and a BRL 1.5 billion project (roughly USD 270 million) aimed at restoring 54,000 hectares of degraded pasture land.

The idea now is for FX-EDGE to export lessons from Eco Invest so that the model can be adapted by other regions around the world.

Carbon markets could unlock billions in climate finance if global standards can align

Carbon markets have enormous potential to channel money into climate projects – payments to developing countries could reach USD 40–144 billion a year by 2035. But there's a catch: buyers need to know that the carbon credits they're purchasing actually deliver the emissions reductions they promise.

That's what negotiators in Antalya are grappling with as they work through the details of Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement.

It’s a very technical topic, but in short: carbon markets let countries and companies pay for emissions cuts elsewhere and count them toward their own targets. Ideally that means sending money to projects in developing countries that struggle to attract capital.

A good idea, but doubts about credit quality, transparency, and double counting have shaken buyers’ confidence and held the market back. Tackling that challenge is urgent, as 94% of Parties are currently considering some form of Article 6 cooperation.

The Action Agenda is stepping up in two ways: yesterday, the Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets – a group of 14 countries, including several developing countries – released a new playbook, outlining policies to ensure companies buy high-quality credits. It’s part of the Action Agenda’s Plan to Grow Carbon Markets.

Getting the rules right might not sound exciting, but it can build trust among buyers and help channel investment to more credible climate projects.

But those credible credits depend on credible counting, which is why the ISO and the GHG Protocol have launched the most ambitious effort yet to harmonize carbon accounting standards through the Action Agenda. The GHG Protocol is used by nearly all large US companies that report their emissions, and ISO works through national standards bodies in more than 170 countries. A draft for the new global framework combining the two goes out for public consultation in 2027, with publication planned for 2028.

Export credit agencies with combined portfolios of USD 376 billion commit to net zero

Climate finance is not just about development banks and private investors. Some of the biggest decisions about what gets built – and what gets traded – are made by export credit agencies that help companies finance exports.

In simple terms, they help companies sell goods and services overseas by making big international deals less risky. Increasingly, they are looking at what those deals mean for climate action.

The UN-convened Net-Zero Export Credit Agencies Alliance (NZECA) brings together ten export credit agencies and export-import banks, which move billions of dollars in international trade. Yesterday, NZECA announced members’ net zero portfolios grew from USD 238 billion to almost USD 376 billion.

These include new climate-positive projects, such as EUR 850 million for French utility ENGIE, helping co-finance over 1.5 GW of wind power in Europe.

Members have also committed to align the emissions linked to their lending and operations with net zero by 2050 or sooner, and to publish emissions data every year. Collective portfolio emissions fell to about 92 million tonnes of CO₂ in 2025, even as total portfolio size grew – meaning members financed more while producing less carbon. They are also ending public backing for overseas fossil fuel projects that don’t capture their emissions. Denmark’s EIFO says it already has, and Sweden’s SEK says it will within five years.

In other news

• The Action Agenda’s Harnessing Public Procurement plan is turning public purchasing power into a driver of climate action. Through UNDP’s Greening Moonshot initiative, 204 clean energy and e-mobility projects have been funded, cutting 4,724 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent and saving USD 1.97 million annually. Momentum is also building behind the Belém Declaration on Sustainable Public Procurement, now backed by nearly 50 national and subnational governments.

For media enquiries please contact: christineluby@climatechampions.team and guilhermelarsen@climatechampions.team.