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The Climate Finance Files 2026: methodology

The OECD reports that developed countries provided US$101.6 billion of international public climate finance in 2024. But we estimate that as little as US$60.4 billion was actually disbursed that year. Most of the difference is down to the problematic decision to count commitments as climate finance.

Building on the 2023 edition of the Climate Finance Files, we’re trying to answer "How much of the climate finance counted in official statistics was disbursed, by whom and to whom?"

To answer that question, we built a new dataset. Its purpose is to trace how the commitments counted as climate finance transform into disbursements. In this case, we follow the methodology behind the OECD's report Climate Finance Provided and Mobilised by Developed Countries in 2013-2024.2

What do we count as climate finance?

First, a few definitions. The Climate Finance Files count international public climate finance. This is money that governments, the EU's institutions, development banks, and climate funds provide to developing countries for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Commitments are firm, written promises a provider makes when it approves a project. Disbursements are the money actually paid out. A commitment records an intention, and intentions are probably not the best way to address climate change. Our headline figures are disbursements.

Developed countries means those included in the OECD reports on the US$100 billion climate goal.1 Money spent by development banks and climate funds is included, proportional to the funding they receive from bilateral providers.

Compared to the OECD's report, we do not include export credits and private finance mobilised by public money. Together, they amount to US$35.1 billion in 2024, but there are no disbursement records published for that money.

Is this the money counted towards the US$100 billion goal?

It is the public part of it. In 2009, developed countries promised to mobilise US$100 billion a year for developing countries by 2020. The OECD reports that they met the goal in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Its 2024 total of US$136.7 billion includes the export credits and mobilised private finance we leave out. Public climate finance alone first passed US$100 billion in 2023. In 2024, countries agreed a new goal of at least US$300 billion a year by 2035, drawn from a wider range of sources.

To be clear, this type of forensic work shouldn’t be necessary. Data on disbursements exists, and it should be published together with climate commitments. Keeping it separate obscures how much climate finance is actually getting to developing countries in a given year. But counting commitments always yields larger numbers than counting disbursements.

For climate-related commitments, the OECD's Climate-related Development Finance (CRDF) dataset records providers’ climate commitments at face value, in the year of commitment. It includes no data on disbursements.

For development finance, the Creditor Reporting System (CRS) includes all commitments and disbursements in a given year. While it includes information on the Rio Markers,7 it provides a less-complete view of climate finance.

The CRS does not link disbursements directly to their original commitment. Linking records across the CRDF and the CRS is complex since they don’t use the same identifiers. Disbursements can also happen years after commitments (and sometimes under new IDs).

To link them, The Climate Finance Files use a combination of methods.

Method What it matches on Share of 2024 disbursements
Exact IDs A project ID, or a World Bank loan number 80%
Project-number rules A project number, narrowed by recipient, date, or purpose 11%
Other rules For example, a project the provider filed under two IDs or two spellings of its number 3%
Statistical matching Models scored on pairs of records, with an AI model reading the uncertain pairs under 0.1%
No link Disbursements marked as climate finance which don’t link back to a commitment 6%

The methods run in order of certainty. To check accuracy, we used AI and machine learning to assess samples of links, and we checked a subsample by hand to calibrate them.4

How much of each project counts as climate finance?

Providers can flag climate mitigation and adaptation projects using the Rio Markers. A project can be marked principal5 or significant6 for each aim, or not targeted (a score of 0) when it has no climate aim.

The Rio Markers were designed to indicate how central climate is to a project, not how much of it was for climate. In practice, a lot of analysis focuses on the total value of projects marked for climate. This leads to overly generous pictures of climate finance.

When reporting to the UN, providers sometimes count the full value of climate-related projects, and sometimes only a portion. Sometimes these shares reflect a case-by-case assessment of the portion of a project that was for climate specifically. Sometimes it’s a specific ratio applied to all projects. Shares differ by provider, and sometimes by agency and year.8 According to an OECD survey, providers count between 30% and 100% of the value of projects marked significant, and between 85% and 100% of those marked principal.

For The Climate Finance Files, we take the shares used by providers when reporting to the UN, when possible.3 Some providers assess each project case-by-case. In that case, we calculate an implied share by dividing the climate amounts reported in the biennial transparency reports, by the CRS amounts of the same projects. For example, the United Kingdom's reports imply 40% for significant and 89% for principal. For France's development agency, the implied shares are 62% and 86% respectively.

For seven providers, we can't measure a share from the UN reports: the United States, Finland, Luxembourg, the Slovak Republic, Hungary, Estonia, and Lithuania. Together, these countries account for about 9% of 2024 bilateral climate finance disbursements. In that case, we count 40% of the value when projects are marked significant and 100% when they are marked as principal. We introduced this approach in 2023 and we consider that it is better than the alternative of counting 100% of all projects.

Development banks report climate components,9 the share of each project that the banks' joint methodology counts as adaptation or mitigation. We use those shares as the banks report them.

Adaptation, mitigation, or both?

The Climate Finance Files follow a highest marker approach. Each project counts once, under its highest marker. It is adaptation finance when its adaptation marker is higher, mitigation finance when its mitigation marker is higher, and cross-cutting when the two are equal. This allows us to produce a total number for climate finance without double counting.

In OECD reporting, a project marked for both appears under both, which means adding adaptation and mitigation finance results in double counting. The OECD labels this as an ‘overlap’ and subtracts it from total climate finance.

How do we count money through development banks and funds?

Developed countries fund development banks and climate funds, which then provide finance to developing countries. Part of each institution's money comes from other shareholders and from markets. The OECD's report credits developed countries with a share of each institution's climate finance.10 We apply those shares, as the OECD reports them, to each institution's climate disbursements and commitments.11

How do we get from the OECD's figure to disbursements?

Getting from the OECD's figure to ours includes three broad steps.

The figures
2024 US$ billion
OECD total counted towards the US$100 billion goal 136.7
Less export credits and mobilised private finance -35.1
OECD public climate finance 101.6
Less the OECD's figure above providers' project records -11.9
Climate commitments in providers' project records 89.7
Less commitments above disbursements in the same year -29.2
Climate finance disbursed 60.4

Figures may not add because of rounding.

First, we exclude US$4.6 billion of export credits and US$30.5 billion of mobilised private finance, which have no disbursement records.

Second, we exclude US$11.9 billion that the OECD counts but providers’ own project records do not show. Most of that gap, US$7.8 billion, is bilateral finance, which the OECD requested from providers as advance data for 2024, ahead of their reports to the UN.

The third step compares 2024 commitments with 2024 disbursements. About half of the US$29.2 billion is likely to be down to timing. Commitments grew from US$66 billion in 2021 to a peak of US$99.7 billion in 2023 and stood at US$89.7 billion in 2024. Most money is disbursed years after it is committed (which is why we insist we should be counting disbursements, not commitments).

Most of the rest is development bank commitments with no matching disbursements in the records. US$4.9 billion of it is commitments by the IFC, IDB Invest, CAF, and two smaller banks, which publish no project-level disbursements. Their commitments are in the US$89.7 billion, but none of their disbursements are in the US$60.4 billion.

Additional caveats

The US$60.4 billion is a floor, based on what the existing data allows us to trace confidently.

  • The IFC, IDB Invest, and CAF do not publish project-level disbursements. Separately, we model their disbursements from their commitments and the disbursement ratios in their own annual reports and CRS series. Including these estimates would add an additional US$4.4 billion to US$4.8 billion in 2024, bringing total Climate Finance disbursements to about US$65 billion.
  • The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development reports US$5.0 billion of its US$8.2 billion of 2024 disbursements only as country totals. The OECD's 2024 data only includes part of the Green Climate Fund's disbursements. We estimate that including these numbers would add roughly US$4 billion more, most of it EBRD disbursements reported only in aggregate.
  • Based on available information (and given often poor reporting quality/completeness), we could not confidently match about US$1 billion of 2024 disbursements, mostly on development-bank projects, to commitments.12

Adding all of these, 2024 disbursements would reach about US$70 billion at most: the US$60.4 billion, plus US$4.4 billion to US$4.8 billion for the banks that publish no project-level disbursements, US$3.7 billion to US$4.6 billion for the EBRD and the Green Climate Fund, and about US$1 billion we could not match.

How does this analysis compare with other estimates?

Other estimates answer different questions, so they differ from ours and from each other.

The OECD's US$101.6 billion of public climate finance for 2024 mostly counts commitments. For 2022, providers' biennial transparency reports to the UN record US$9.0 billion of US$41.7 billion of bilateral climate finance as disbursed and the rest as committed.

Oxfam's July 2026 update to its Climate Finance Short-Changed analysis values loans at their grant equivalent and adjusts for climate relevance it judges overstated. It puts the "true value" of the US$137 billion reported for 2024 at US$33 billion to US$45 billion. Oxfam's figure measures what the money cost the provider, and ours measures what was disbursed at face value. The two cannot be directly compared.

The development banks' joint report counts US$85.1 billion of climate finance to low- and middle-income economies in 2024. The OECD attributes US$50.5 billion of bank finance to developed countries.

Climate Policy Initiative counts more than US$2 trillion of climate finance worldwide in 2024, most of it domestic and private.

Sources

The Climate Finance Files use data from:

  1. The members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) except Korea, plus Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Malta, Romania, Liechtenstein, and Monaco. ↩

  2. The report adds four parts: bilateral public climate finance; finance from development banks and climate funds, attributed to developed countries; climate-related export credits; and private finance mobilised by public money. Bilateral figures come from providers' reports to the UN, or from advance data the OECD requests for years not yet reported. Multilateral figures come from OECD statistics and the institutions' annual reports. ↩

  3. There are problems with this approach but we wanted numbers to be directly comparable. Given the lack of clear reporting guidelines, reporting to the UN suffers from inconsistencies in how much of projects is counted, and how. ↩

  4. Hand and AI labels agreed on all 19 pairs linked by exact ID or confirmed by a bank's ledger. On the other links, the AI reviewers accepted some pairs we rejected, so we scale their labels by the rate at which our hand checks confirmed them. ↩

  5. A score of 2. Climate is a fundamental aim of the project. ↩

  6. A score of 1. Climate is an explicit but secondary aim of the project. ↩

  7. Scores providers give each project they report to the OECD, for whether it aims at climate change mitigation or adaptation: 2 when climate is a principal aim, 1 when it is a significant aim, 0 when it is not targeted. Providers assign the scores themselves. ↩

  8. For example, Germany has its own share for a project significant for both aims, and Australia, which assesses each project case by case, states a default of 30%. ↩

  9. The parts of a project's cost that a bank counts as climate finance, such as the solar panels in a power loan. The banks identify them under their joint methodology for tracking adaptation and mitigation finance, and report them with each project. ↩

  10. Table 8 of OECD, Climate Finance Provided and Mobilised by Developed Countries in 2013-2024 (May 2026). Banks and funds follow its grouping, which counts the Private Infrastructure Development Group and the North American Development Bank as banks. ↩

  11. Table 8 prints shares for 2015, 2018, 2020, and 2024. Years 2013 to 2015 take the 2015 share, 2016 to 2019 the 2018 share, and 2020 to 2024 the 2020 share. Only the IMF's Resilience and Sustainability Trust uses the 2024 column, which it takes for every year from 2022. ↩

  12. The largest single cause is the OECD's file, which from 2023 rounds the project numbers of the African Development Bank and Fund. ↩