Climate Compatible Growth at COP30

Developing technically feasible and politically viable national decarbonisation pathways poses numerous challenges, especially for developing countries. Often, technical assistance programmes offered by international organizations rely on external consultants to overcome limitations in local institutional capacity. While this approach may deliver analytics rapidly, the resulting plans are typically not fully owned or informed by local counterparts and are likely to prove unsustainable as a result.

CCG has been developing an approach that focuses instead on empowering local analysts to conduct their own modelling of climate transition pathways and ultimately to embed this in local institutional processes. Under this approach, external actors (like CCG and partners) play a facilitating role, with the main objective being to build sustainable capacity for planning in country, working across the entire academic and policy-making ecosystem. This event will explore experiences from CCG partner countries in using the resources and training that CCG offers to develop their NDC and other climate strategies. It will highlight lessons learned, best practices, and the impact of locally led modelling and decision-making on the development of national decarbonisation pathways.

Countries around the world are developing multi-billion-dollar investment plans for climate transition. Planning efforts typically focus on technical considerations and the required rollout of clean technologies, with financing coming as an afterthought, and many transition plans consequently lacking financial realism. With growing calls for transition planning efforts to be more closely aligned with, and informed by, considerations around downstream capital mobilization, this session will showcase new analytical tools developed by CCG. These support countries in understanding the financing constraints that they face and identify the most relevant sources of concessional finance. A case study from Zambia, will be used to illustrate the application of these tools to develop a financing roadmap for the country’s Integrated Resource Plan, with opportunity for discussion of challenges, opportunities and key learning points unlocked from this experience.

Data-to-Deal is a proven and comprehensive framework for supporting countries through the entire climate transition process, ranging all the way from upstream political facilitation and technical work, through to downstream financial mobilisation. The Data-to-Deal framework – developed by Climate Compatible Growth with a wide consortium of partner institutions – draws on the experiences of several countries across Latin America, which successfully mobilized $11 billion of climate finance.

For COP30, Climate Compatible Growth together with some 20 international organizations, wrote a collection of “best practice” briefs providing detailed guidance on implementation for each of the seven components of the Data-to-Deal framework. This event presented these new practitioner resources and provided a platform to reflect on the key insights and challenges that have emerged throughout their development over the past year. It also explored how best practices can support countries in translating robust data and analysis into actionable investment strategies for the energy transition.

Vivien Foster (CCG and Imperial College London) Chaired. Prof Mark Howells (Director CCG) introduced the D2D Best Practice Briefs and there was a round table of contributors featuring Simon Benmarraze, Head of Innovation & Technology Centre, IRENA, Marcela Jaramillo, Executive Director, 2050 Pathways Platform and Professor Nam Nguyen, National Economics University, Vietnam among others.