Today at COP31, Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) 're-announced' their latest joint climate finance figures – USD$103 billion raised in 2025 for low- and middle-income countries. They are expected to discuss the figures, and how they arrived at them, again tomorrow, in a Joint MDB Pavilion event focused on celebrating record private finance mobilisation. The MDBs role as delivery vehicles for climate finance was cemented at COP29 two years ago, where the banks estimated that, by 2030, they’d be mobilising highs of $120 billion annually.
In stark contrast, just a month ago at the World Bank Annual Meetings, the word “climate” was noticeably absent from the agenda, as was its 45% climate finance target, which it retired this year after bowing to US pressure. Rumours abound that the InterAmerican Development Bank is to follow suit, but are saving the announcement for the post-COP fatigue.
This week we saw a different side to the MDBs, as they helped launch the new Electrify Now Finance Coalition and hosted panel after panel discussing climate action, clean energy transition, and green industrialisation. With the World Bank in the chair and no additional money pledge by donors, this new electrification coalition raises skepticism: Is it yet another announcement to distract us from cuts to the public climate finance that developing countries have committed to and that communities desperately need to see materialise?
At tomorrow’s event, as MDBs “place private climate finance mobilisation at the centre of the discussion”, civil society observers will be asking where that leaves people, and their rights – an afterthought, once profits have been made? The reality is that private capital mobilisation is not going to save the planet, and MDBs are not fit to play a bigger role in climate finance without significant reform - stronger accountability, more transparency on what they count as climate finance, rapid implementation of their commitment to focus on and improve impact, an end to loopholes that allow finance to flow to fossil fuels and risky projects, and better quality finance for low-income countries that does not exacerbate the debt crisis.
Big Shift Global coalition members reacted to the announcement:
Friederike Strub, Recourse: “Multilateral Development Banks love to tout big numbers, but we need to talk about the quality. Just 4% of MDB climate finance is grants and over 80% loans, at a time when 3.7 billion people live in countries spending more on interest payments than education or health. The MDB’s ‘private finance first’ approach deepens a vicious cycle of debt, fossil fuel extraction and climate disasters, while driving precious public money to projects that generate profit above all else. Add to that lax accounting frameworks and an exclusion list that doesn’t even cover all fossil fuels, it’s high time the MDBs reform their approach. Ideally, the governance and accounting frameworks for climate finance should come from the UNFCCC — until then, the MDBs will just make up their own rules.”
Ellenor Bartolome, Philippine Movement for Climate Justice: “The MDBs are accomplices in the Global North’s delays, detours, and distractions as it dodges its obligation to pay up for climate finance. The already vulnerable communities in the Global South have been left to face overshoot because of the refusal to provide finance. What we need is urgent, scaled, unconditional, non-debt-creating climate finance. That is why this ‘record private mobilization’ is not climate finance. Private capital follows profits, not our actual needs to survive and recover from this climate catastrophe. Rich, polluting nations cannot just outsource their obligation to another institution with a legacy of debt and conditionality. COP31 has no place for yet another act of destructive collusion. The MDBs must refuse to be instruments of the Global North’s interests. If these MDBs are really serious about supporting the Global South in confronting the climate crisis, they must stop financing fossil fuels and end their cycle of debt, domination, and dependency.”