Actors
The institutions, coalitions, and individuals shaping how climate finance works, and who it works for.
Nine actors. One question: who decides where the money flows?
- 01 CDP Formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, CDP runs the world's largest environmental disclosure system and assigns letter grades that can move markets.
- 02 Climate Action 100+ An investor coalition that targets the world's largest corporate emitters, not to exclude them from portfolios, but to change how they operate from the inside.
- 03 Development Finance Institutions DFIs are public finance bodies whose job is to unlock private investment in developing countries, and in the climate context, they are the critical link between rich-country pledges and real-world project funding.
- 04 GFANZ The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero brought together $130 trillion in financial assets under a net-zero umbrella, and then watched parts of it unravel under political pressure.
- 05 IPCC The UN body that synthesises global climate science. It does not run experiments; it referees them.
- 06 Mark Carney and the Tragedy of the Horizon Mark Carney's 2015 speech reframed climate change as a systemic financial risk, and in doing so, helped launch an entirely new field of practice.
- 07 Science Based Targets Initiative SBTi validates whether a company's emissions reduction plan is actually consistent with climate science. It is the closest thing to a gold standard for corporate net-zero claims.
- 08 Transition Pathway Initiative TPI assesses whether listed companies in high-carbon sectors are actually managing climate risk and reducing emissions in line with Paris Agreement scenarios, and publishes the results for anyone to see.
- 09 UNFCCC and COP The 1992 treaty that created the international climate negotiation system; COP is the annual gathering where that system does its work, and generates most of its headlines.