Roberto La Rocca

This report builds on the conclusions of the Green Infrastructure Finance: Leading Initiatives and Research report and lays out a simple and elegant way in which scarce public financing can leverage market interest in ‘greening’ infrastructure, particularly in the East Asia and Pacific Region. The framework introduced in the report bridges ideas and concepts between environmental economics and project finance practices and consists largely of an analytical methodology for determining the financial viability gap of low-emission projects and an approach for assessing and strengthening the green investment climate in a given country environment. The authors argue that the solution to the financing challenge of low-emission investments lies in understanding the causes of a given project’s financial viability gap, and then investigating how specific actions, including concessional financing, strategic subsidies and other public policy interventions and reforms, can be deployed in a complementary fashion to close the gap. The approach provides suggestions for appropriately allocating risks and responsibilities to various stakeholders for financing portions of the financial viability gap and recommends using multiple instruments and tools to make green investments viable. Governments, for example, could rebalance their own policy distortions with a mix of domestic instruments such as feed-in tariffs, direct subsidies, domestic carbon taxes, and other financing and fiscal incentives. The international community could contribute international instruments for monetizing the global externality benefits of green investments through concessional financing and direct grants. Such an approach results in hybrid financing structures designed to maximize the leveraging effect of public interventions.

"Increasing concerns over the effects of climate change have heightened the importance of accelerating investments in green growth. The International Energy Agency, for example, estimates that to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 50 percent by 2050, global investments in the energy sector alone will need to total US$750 billion a year by 2030 and over US$1.6 trillion a year from 2030-2050. Despite global efforts to mobilize required capital flows, the investments still fall far short. Bloomberg New Energy Finance argues that by 2020 investments will be US$150 billion short from the levels required simply to stabilize CO2 emissions. For the East Asia and Pacific region alone, the World Bank study Winds of Change suggests that additional investments of US$80 billion a year over the next two decades are required.