Data-to-Deal: Open Data and Modelling of Long-Term Strategies to Financial Resource Mobilization – the case of Costa Rica

This paper explores the data-to-deal pipeline, and uses the case of Costa Rica to show how developing nationally owned Long-Term Strategies (LTSs) can lead to international climate finance. LTSs can be developed through an iterative process of codesigning with stakeholders and experts to form a joint vision of a development path. Once a roadmap is defined, governments can match financing sources and instruments to deliver the measures and projects defined in the LTS, providing signals to align broader finance flows toward the lower carbon economy. The exercise can increase access to and effectiveness of international climate finance.

In the case of Costa Rica, a data-driven, stakeholder-codesigned National Decarbonization Plan (the country’s LTS) was launched in 2019. It has been the foundation on which at least USD 2.4 billion had been mobilized from international concessional finance sources by the end of 2022. An essential effort underpinning this was a carefully crafted and nationally owned LTS study that leveraged public-good open-models and associated advanced-schools, communities, principles, and goals. The LTS study’s direct cost was less than USD 200k.

The full paper is available here, or you can read a summary below.