The Climate Finance Files by ONE Campaign

No one really knows how much is being spent to address climate change. So ONE launched The Climate Finance Files, a detailed account of what's being spent, where.

Climate finance data is notoriously difficult to access and understand. The different reporting systems, methodologies, sources, and types of finance can make it hard to provide straightforward answers to key questions.

We started this work to quantify annual climate finance contributions by specific countries. But asking a question as simple as "How much does France spend on climate mitigation and adaptation in developing countries?" raised a myriad of questions: According to which source? Commitments or disbursements? Grants or loans? ODA or other official flows? Bilaterally or multilaterally... and so on.

Finding answers to these questions isn't easy. Different organisations have different motivations for how they report and present this data. And analysing climate finance in a robust way requires going back to messy and complex raw data.

We realise that many organisations have a strong track record of analysing climate finance data. We have learnt a lot from that work.

But we think that accessing clean, comparable data on climate finance should be much easier than it is now.